Improve customer loyalty with sales & delivery applications

Personalizing the Delivery Experience: How Sales and Delivery Applications Can Improve Customer Loyalty

What is the relation between customer loyalty and using sales and delivery applications? Well, sales and delivery applications have a direct and indirect impact on customer loyalty. When you have the right tools to streamline your business, the company's overall efficiency increases, and you can better fulfill your purpose- to build a loyal customer pool and receive more and more orders. Free photo delivery truck good distribution services

Free photo delivery truck good distribution services

Read below how sales and delivery automation technology can affect and further increase customer loyalty.

Better delivery time

Sales and delivery applications help you to streamline your processes and save time; this, in turn, reduces the delivery time and keeps your customers satisfied with your fast delivery service. These automation tools aim to make the order fulfillment process as smooth and quick as possible. The Radius360x Delivery route planner finds the most optimized route for multi-stop deliveries after considering important factors like traffic, tolls, etc. It also automates truck loading and makes the whole process paperless. You can also update your customers on their order status as you get live updates of where the order is. Sales reps application helps your sales team by providing powerful sales force solutions, real-time sales updates, and the feature of making customized catalogs for your customers. It empowers the sales reps to deliver their best customer service to your clients. It saves sales reps time, which they can invest in making strategic sales decisions. They can draw up plans that better suit the needs and wants of your customers, keeping them satisfied and loyal to your business.

Lesser supply chain disruptions

You face fewer manual errors and unexpected situations when you streamline your processes. You have a track of the overall view of your business operations. With live updates of inventory, you can easily avoid problems like understocking. If you run out of stock frequently because of mismanagement of merchandise, it would be easier to meet your buyers' demand. They can also view stock availability, reducing the hassle of calling sales reps and confirming. Fewer supply chain disruptions mean customers get what they want on time via a smooth process. Consistently fulfilling demands builds a loyal customer pool. Obstacles in the order fulfillment process make your customers unhappy. Equip yourself with the most innovative sales and delivery automation tools possible and make your customers return to you whenever they need to place orders.

Personalization

Through automation, you can make every customer feel special. Your sales reps don't need to customize every message for your customers manually; they can automate them. The Radius360x sales rep application allows your sales reps to make customized catalogs for your buyers and maintain customer accounts. The right tools will enable them to get valuable insights into your customers' preferences, needs, and challenges. Sales and delivery applications help sales reps to provide better customer experience throughout the customer relationship. High-quality experience retains customers and brings in more.

Paperless processes

Another benefit of automation tools is the elimination of paper processes. Your sales and delivery processes are digitized, and your customers can place orders through customer portals and get paperless invoices. Digitization shows that you are adapting to the current market trends and makes you competitive among other players in the market. Paperless processes are also seamless, reducing the stress of filling out paperwork. The more accessible, fast, and smooth you make your order processing and fulfillment, the better satisfied your customers will be. Not to mention, paperless processes are quick, meaning your buyers get their delivery orders on time.

Conclusion

The best and least expensive form of marketing is word of mouth. Potential buyers become more compelled to deal with you when they hear you provide an excellent customer experience. That is why building a loyal pool of customers who act as good advocates of your business is essential. You can earn the loyalty of your customers by fulfilling orders on time, reducing errors in orders, eliminating supply chain disruptions, and giving them regular updates about the order status. The Radius360x sales and delivery automation tools will help you in all those aspects. Schedule a demo with our team to learn more. While reading about growing your business, read the order management guide 101.

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Data driven decisions: Why and How?

Make smart moves with data driven decisions

The distribution industry has long moved on from traditional methods of doing business and incorporated technology in most of its functions. It is the time of online ordering, social media marketing, collecting relevant data, automation, and more innovations that help a business flourish. Smart decision-makers should no longer be dependent on guesswork or gut feeling when it comes to making decisions for the company. The necessity to make data driven decisions does not only apply to the big decisions, it is also important while making small routine ones. Not to mention that making informed decisions saves time, money, and effort by preventing trial and error. Keep on reading to know more about the importance of using data to make decisions. Relying on guesswork in the decision-making process can result in wastage of time and effort. Do your business a favor. Avoid the guesswork and rely on accurate data to move forward. Data driven decision making is the process of using metrics, data, and facts to make strategic business decisions in order to achieve organizational goals. Decision like:

How to progress with the marketing campaign
What products are trending
Which prospects to focus on
How to minimize delivery time
Inventory management
Supply chain optimization
Where to invest
Optimizing selling time
Best source for getting new clients

Thorough analysis of data is necessary for decisions like the above ones. Sure, you can make some qualitative decisions with the help of your intuition, but measurable decisions need data to back them up. The best way is to find the perfect balance between gut feeling and data analysis and then analyze the whole picture. Collect data related to important KPIs and analyze it to improve any part of your business that needs it. Small, intelligent decisions when executed together lead to increased profit for your company. Free photo data analysis marketing business report concept

Free photo data analysis marketing business report concept

Why is it important to make data driven decisions?

It is essential to do so because data helps make smart decisions. You can make better sales projections, develop successful marketing campaigns, attract suitable customers, sell your inventory, and even keep your customers satisfied and happy. After all, happy customers become repeating customers which converts into an increase in revenue for the business. Another important thing to note is that data driven decisions make past and present performances comparable and can help in finding the loopholes. It can also make projections for the future so that you work accordingly. You can analyze your target customers’ preferences, needs, style, etc. Everything you need to personalize your marketing campaign according to them. The bottom line is you can get the best results in any operation you execute by using your data in the right way. Most companies have huge amounts of information running in their systems, but they don’t know how to leverage it. Don’t make this common mistake. Use the information. Make relevant decisions. Get the results you want.

But how?

You might be thinking, but how can you analyze all the different data coming from various departments of your business? It is normal to ask this as it is extremely difficult to compile and analyze the huge amount of information flowing through your systems. It gets easy, you just need to have the right tools at your disposal. You need to have a helping hand that’ll convert the raw data into readable reports. Decision-makers can focus on using their innovative minds to make strategies. They shouldn’t have to worry about making reports through scratch. Our Business Intelligence dashboard has already helped our clients to analyze their business data properly for making better data driven decisions. Want to take your business to new heights? Leverage your data and make informed decisions. The benefits of our solution are that you can generate actionable business reports based on the latest real-time data. These reports consist of easy to read and analyze graphical and diagrammatic representations of your data. Making data driven decisions with the help of our BI dashboard can become your key to success. It helps you to use the information running in your systems in the most efficient way. Contact us for a demo and we’ll be sure to amaze you.

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Cloud-based platform for distribution business

Importance of Cloud-based platform

A cloud-based platform for distribution business is a software solution hosted on a remote server and accessed over the internet. It provides a centralized platform for managing various aspects of distribution business operations, including inventory management, order processing, logistics, and sales management. Examples of cloud-based platforms for distribution business include Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP Business One, and Zoho Inventory. These platforms offer various features such as customer relationship management, reporting, analytics, and automation of workflows. By utilizing a cloud-based platform, distribution businesses can streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Cloud-based platform to overcome challenges in business

Market trends, pandemics, competitors, etc. are not in your control as a business owner. You cannot change what is outside of your business, you can make the best possible strategies and channel your way through challenges. But do you have to tackle all challenges alone? No, you can take help from the best tools possible, not only to overcome problems but to also take your business to the next level. This article talks about how a cloud-based platform can help you in the course of your business. Cloud-based platforms are helping businesses all over the world to tackle major business challenges. Keep on reading to know how cloud technology can help a business owner like you:

Remote work

A cloud-based system will support your team even when you are working remotely. No employee is left out of the loop as information is readily available on smartphones or other devices to the relevant parties. You can provide flexibility to your traveling employees, freelance workers, remote teammates, and help them achieve a better work-life balance. Providing flexibility to employees is one of the best employee retention strategies. No matter how scattered or in-one-place your team is, cloud helps employees to give you the best results possible with seamless collaboration.

Enhanced productivity

Cloud technology helps to achieve better productivity in the workplace. Employees can share information easily with each other and collaborate efficiently. Cloud provides a secure and seamless way of communication to your employees. Employees can communicate without a cloud-based platform too but that will not be as productive and result in waste of resources. You can also track your employees’ performance in real-time and help them achieve more by pointing out their weaknesses. Cloud also increases productivity by automating routine work and giving the most up-to-date information to the decision-makers.

Better customer satisfaction

As buyers have shifted to online buying, their customer journey has changed overtime. Distributors and wholesalers need to keep up with the changes happening around them. Customers expect a business to provide omnichannel experiences and flexible buying options. Cloud can help you to integrate all your data from different departments and have a single view of all your business activities. This will also allow you to personalize your marketing strategy according to your customers. Cloud makes it easier to track customer behavior and helps you to know your customers inside out. You’ll be able to provide better customer satisfaction when you have accurate information at hand.

Optimized inventory management

If you are a distributor in today’s fast world and are still not tracking your inventory in real-time, then you are losing to your competitors. You could track your inventory and have the most up-to-date information as if you are in the warehouse all the time. Real-time inventory data can help you serve your customers better as you can now avoid understocking situations and always have instore what your buyers are looking for. You can also avoid unnecessary storage costs by maintaining optimized inventory levels.

Improved sales

With a cloud-based platform backing up your sales team, they can better nurture leads, automate marketing campaigns, track customer behavior, monitor the sales pipeline, and more. You can analyze metrics with the most accurate data and calculate your ROI in real-time with the help of a cloud-based platform. It will help you to define your true market and potential customers so that you can direct your sales efforts where you’ll see the most conversions. Lastly, cloud-based platforms are cost effective because you don’t have to worry about maintenance of the software or other technicalities. The vendor takes care of everything, and you can use the application as per your needs by paying a subscription fee. The cloud provider also monitors the security of your data. The Radius360x field sales rep application is a cloud-based software that allows your sales rep to be productive on the field and serve your customers in the best way possible. It helps your sales reps to perform better collaboration through uninterrupted communication and real-time updates. Contact us to know more!

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Integrating Order Processing Software with your 3PL

6 perks of Integrating with your 3PL

Do you manually communicate order details to your warehouse? If yes, then this article is for you. If you don’t have an order processing software that directly communicates order details to your warehouse, then you are limiting the scalability of your business. You may also face difficulties during peak times. Your order fulfillment process can be improved. Want to know how? Keep on reading to learn more.

What is meant by integrating with your 3PL (Third-party logistics)?

It simply means that you have set up an automated system that sends the order information to your warehouse management system. Order and shipping information is exchanged smoothly between the two systems with the help of integration. Doing so removes the manual work, hassle, and inconsistency in your order fulfillment process. If a business has not yet integrated with their WMS, they are missing out on a lot of benefits.

Here are 6 reasons why you must integrate with your 3PL partner:

Automation of order entry

Integrating with your 3PL will lead to automation of order entry and remove human touch from the order entry process. The average accuracy of a typist is 92%, however, this number can be improved by quality checking but that consumes too much time and money. We need a fast and accurate solution in today’s world. And why not? Automation will minimize human error and save you time and resources. You need to develop a system through which your sales resp, customers and you are able to put order details directly into the system. This way you don’t need to employ anyone for order entry. Your ordering, shipping and accounting must be truly integrated with each other to form an efficient system through which accurate information can flow.

Enhanced communication

Integrating your ordering software with your fulfillment partner’s software enhances communication between the two parties. Better communication ensures that everyone is on the same page, and you can work as a team in challenging times. You cannot manually fill in your warehouse management with order information daily. It would take away precious time and also increase the chances of manual errors in communication. Similarly, you cannot ask your warehouse management to take order information manually from you. This would increase charges that can be easily avoided. An integrated system allows easy flow of accurate information wherever required. Clear communication is the key to happy customers as well because they receive their orders on time.

Improved fulfillment efficiency

Integrating improves your order fulfillment efficiency. It creates a consistent flow in the sending of order details to the 3PL. Sending orders manually to your warehouse limits your efficiency and scalability. You need the extra staff, time, and money to key in orders manually. Integration gives you a smooth flow of information and makes the order fulfillment process accurate and efficient. A full-proof fulfillment process will result in happy and repeating customers and eventually more revenue for you.

Customer satisfaction

Customers get a lot of benefits when you integrate with your 3PL. They get live updates of their order status & receive timely deliveries. It helps them to avoid out of stock situations. All in all, your customers start getting quality customer experience. And why is that important? Providing top quality CX is essential for winning customer loyalty and increasing revenue for your company. Every brand wants to achieve a loyal pool of customers and 3PL integration is an important step to reach there.

Saves resources

Integration saves you essential resources like time and money. You don’t need to hire staff for order entry and don’t need resources for correcting manual errors too. Clients with more manual processes typically pay higher account management fees to 3PLs. This is because manual processes require additional time and quality checks. Integration removes manual processes resulting in lesser costly order entry mistakes and lower account management fees. Additionally, you don’t need to invest large sums of money in transportation, warehouse, spaces, staff, tracking, etc. as your 3PL partner will provide all that for you.

Real-time picture of inventory

3PL warehouse management system allows you to get real-time inventory updates. You can give live order status to your customers to enhance their customer experience. Consistent and clear communication with your warehouse management allows you to get picking and loading updates. Another benefit of real-time inventory updates is that you can avoid problems like overstocking or running out of an item. Free photo warehouse workers checking inventory and consulting each other about organization and distribution of goods

Free photo warehouse workers checking inventory and consulting each other about organization and distribution of goods

Conclusion

These benefits are the reasons that you need to integrate with your 3PL. Doing so will set your business up for success as you would get satisfied customers and an efficient order fulfillment process. Our application- Radius360x has sales, delivery, and warehouse management solutions for your business. We have built solutions that ensure smooth and efficient workflows. Our tools allow you to get a real-time picture of inventory and order status. You can communicate information to your drivers and warehouse without wasting time on manual processes. Schedule a call with us to learn more about how our solutions can help your business grow. All the best on your integration with your 3PL journey.

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Ecommerce for wholesalers & manufacturers

Better customer experience with ecommerce

Is the traditional system of ordering working fine for you? It may work well for a limited number of customers, limited area, and limited sales orders. Scaling up with the traditional ordering system would require you to hire a bunch of employees every time you face a growth spurt. Is hiring that many people feasible? You’ll have to lay them down again when you have no sales in the off season. Expanding your business or handling growth spurts with a traditional ordering and accounting system is full of hassle, manual effort, errors, and extra costs. A business may not be able to handle these challenges without losing profit. You have to give your buyers a fast and efficient ecommerce platform where they can place orders as many times they want. The more convenience you give to your buyers, the more loyal they become to your company. They too are managing a lot of customers of their own and probably have a mirage of things to manage with the holiday season going on. You can show that you care about their ease-of-life and give them a simplified ordering process. Photo shopping cart on the business table

Photo shopping cart on the business table

Your customers want a better ordering system

An ecommerce platform allows you to have control over what information is viewable for your customers. When your customer login to their customer portal, they’ll be able to see the products available to them and the prices. Manual errors like buying someone else’s stock or quoting a wrong price will be eliminated when you put an ecommerce platform in place. You’ll be able to manage multiple sale accounts at a time and also avoid ordering mistakes. Your customers will be impressed by the efforts you are making to make ordering easy and fast. The best example of increased orders is the holiday season. Your customers(retailers) want to take care of their customers in the holiday season and meet their increased demand. They’ll appreciate the extra effort you are putting in to make ordering hassle-free for them. Knowing that something better has been arranged for them, they’ll become a loyal and repeating customer of yours. You may think that the holiday season is not the time to set up a new system, but you are wrong. It is the peak time for your business and the most crucial time to get orders right, deliver them on time, making recording easy, and making every process efficient. However, the acceptance of an online ordering system may also depend on the age of your customers. Young buyers will be keen to move to a better and advanced system while the older retailers might prefer the traditional one. You can tackle this acceptance challenge by providing a simple UI and training modules suitable for all age groups.

Integrate QuickBooks with your ecommerce system

QuickBooks is a powerful accounting software for ecommerce businesses. It integrates smoothly with the ecommerce platform and streamlines accounting and ordering functions. Your customers would be able to place orders from tehri devices. Then those order entries will automatically be recorded in QuickBooks as per the payment mode. QuickBooks is sort of mainstream among distributor and wholesale businesses but providing retailers with an easy-to-use ecommerce platform is the next challenge. You can check out our Radius360x ecommerce platform. It is user-friendly and easy to deploy. Contact us and we’ll help you out in setting up your own ecommerce platform.

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Steps to improve the life of your drivers

Steps to make your drivers’ job easy

Fleet drivers are an essential part of the order fulfillment cycle. They deliver the goods to the customers and play a major role in customer experience. Fast deliveries are a part of customer experience, and your fleet drivers are the ones who can help you achieve them. Help your drivers to perform better on the field by taking some basic measures. It is the management's responsibility to make the life of the drivers easy. That can be done merely by showing appreciation to the drivers for their hard work or investing in the right tools to help drivers achieve their goal more effectively. You’ll save your drivers from a great amount of frustration by streamlining the order fulfillment process. They wouldn’t need to update you manually on the delivery status or find order details on paper when you equip them with the right tools. Keep on reading to find out more.

Below listed are some ways in which you can help your drivers to do a better job:

Go paperless: Filling out paperwork is a hassle that you can remove from the life of your drivers. Providing them with the right tools can transform the whole order fulfillment process. Paperwork also slows down and extends the delivery time. The Radius360x delivery route partner application makes the whole delivery process paperless. It increases the productivity of your drivers and saves them from filling out paperwork during loading and delivery. They can update completed delivery records after every stop through the application. Trucks can be loaded by scanning items with a camera, and drivers' delivery plans will determine how each truck will be loaded.
Find the most optimized route: Automate finding the most ideal route for your fleet drivers. Invest in an application that can generate an optimized delivery route for your deliveries after taking in account various factors such as roadblocks, weather, traffic, congestion, etc. Drivers don’t need to waste their time in traffic anymore. Also, finding optimized routes is beneficial for your customer satisfaction as well as they get timely deliveries. Our application gives you the most ideal multi stop delivery route that is time and cost effective. An optimized route also helps to save fuel. Moreover, our application finds the safest route for your fleet drivers to ensure their safety on the road.
Incentivize safe and timely deliveries: Customers feel satisfied when your drivers deliver to them on time. You can reward your drivers for timely and safe deliveries. Make an incentive program for those drivers who save on fuel too. Encourage your drivers to cultivate healthy road habits like following the speed limit and not using mobile phones while driving. You can track delivery time, speed, and driver performance with the help of a fleet management software like Radius360x delivery route planner. Incentivizing is a great way to motivate your drivers to fulfill orders on time. Your part is to equip your drivers with the right tool that helps them find the most ideal journey.
Show your drivers that you respect them: A valued, and respected employee works harder for its employer. Every job position is important for an organization to function and achieve its goals. Drivers play a major role in fulfilling the sales orders your sales reps get for you. Show your drivers that you respect them, and they are valued at your organization. They will be willing to go above and beyond for your company when you recognize them for the part, they play in the order cycle.
Encourage them to communicate: Another essential step in improving the life of your drivers is to listen to what they have to say. Being field workers, they know the road challenges better than you. Create surveys for your drivers to fill out and be open to feedback anytime they have something to communicate.

The Radius360x delivery route partner application customizes routes with filters after considering many factors. It takes into account weather, traffic, roadblocks, congestion, etc. and generates the shortest, safest, and ideal route. It also digitizes the delivery process and eliminates paperwork. On top of all those rich features, our delivery route optimizer also allows managers to see the real-time updates of loading and delivery. Schedule a call with us to know more about our solutions and how we can help you.

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How to build a Market Penetration strategy?

Market Penetration: What, why and how?

Every business owner comes across the word ‘market penetration’. It can hold different meanings in different contexts. It is essential to know what it means and how you can create a market penetration strategy. Keep on reading to learn more about market penetration and how to use it as a measurement.

Meaning of market penetration

Market penetration can have two meanings. It can be both market penetration rate and market penetration strategy. The former is measured as a percentage and the latter is performed as a business activity to grow your market share. If you are a distributor and there are 100 retailers in your service area. You have 30 recurring retailers who buy goods from you. Then you have a 30% penetration rate. Market penetration can also be viewed as an activity that is performed to increase your market share.

Calculation of penetration rate

When you use market penetration as measurement, it is calculated as penetration rate. Penetration rate tells you how much of your products/services the customers are using with respect to the total market size. It shows you an insight about where your business stands in the market as compared to your competitors. (Number of Customers / Target Market Size) x 100 = Penetration Rate You can measure penetration rate after each quarter, year or every sales campaign. It will show the results of your efforts done towards market penetration and the scope of improvement. Happy young asian businessmen and businesswomen meeting brainstorming ideas about new paperwork project

Happy young asian businessmen and businesswomen meeting brainstorming ideas about new paperwork project

Importance of market penetration for field service businesses

Why is market penetration so important? Let’s find out. These are the main reasons why every business no matter how big or small should focus on preparing a market penetration strategy.

Focus on increase in sale

Market penetration is crucial to acquire more customers, sell more products, and expand a business. It helps to increase sales which means more revenue for the business.

Market acquisition

Market penetration boosts adoption of your product by your target customers. You acquire more and more customers eventually increasing your market share & understanding your market deeply.

Finding growth opportunities

You discover new areas for business while looking for penetration opportunities. New product/service ideas and changes in current product also come forward. These types of new opportunities help in the growth of business.

How to build a market penetration strategy?

A market penetration strategy is simply a plan to gain a higher market share in the market. It states the things you need to do to increase your sales and eventually your market share. Here are few things that you can include in your market penetration strategy:

Engage with your buyers: Increase the number of interactions you have with your customers. Take feedback from them and know their wants. You can also perform social selling and cold calling activities more often.
Give better offers: Give introductory offers and discounted bulk orders to your buyers. Changing your pricing is an essential part of market penetration strategy. Pull customers towards you by giving them attractive pricing and discount offers.
Expand to new areas: Identify new areas in which you can expand your business. If you have the resources to expand to new areas, then it is an excellent idea to increase your number of customers.
Launch a new marketing campaign: Revamp your old marketing plan and try to find innovative ways to market your product. You may find something unique that your competitors aren’t doing. Brainstorm to find new ideas to attract customers.
Take advantage of digital marketing: Invest in targeted ads that go to your specific buyers. Tailor your digital marketing efforts for your target audience. Utilize those channels for marketing where your customers are present & rework your marketing strategies to gain customers.
Identify the need for a new product: By doing a market analysis, you can identify the need for a new product that your competitors have overlooked. Or you can make changes to your existing product to meet the demands of the buyers. Find out what your target audience wants and deliver that to acquire more market share.
Boost sales rep activities: Motivate your sales reps to put extra efforts in sales activities. Encourage them to have more interactions with qualified leads. You can add new sales strategies to your already existing sales plan to boost sales. Focus on personalized selling and meeting with the buyer whenever possible.
Purchase a competitor: As your business grows, you can buy out a small business or competitor in your area. You can use their brand value to sell more goods and also acquire their current customers. The market share of your business will increase considerably by this strategy.

These were some ways in which you can acquire more share in the market. Do apply them and tweak them in your own unique ways that work best for you.

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Improve your field service operations

5 ways to improve your field service operations

Does your business include field service operations? If yes, then this article is for you. Keep on reading to know about 5 ways about how to improve the performance of your field service team. Today’s customers have high expectations, and it is essential to operate at the maximum efficacy possible to match your buyer’s needs. Being efficient and automation workflows also increases the scalability of the business and allows it to handle growth spurts with ease.

Fsm field service management marketing materials vector stock illustration

Read below about the 5 ways to improve your field service operations:

Map the most efficient route

This is the most important thing to do while managing field service operations. Give your drivers the most efficient and safe route for multi-stop deliveries. Our Radius360x delivery route optimizer finds the best route for fleet drivers and allows them to save time. Timely deliveries are an important part of customer experience, that’s why deliveries must be done with speed and utmost efficiencies. Our delivery route optimizer factors in many inputs and curates the shortest and most efficient route. It allows you to save costs on fuel and labor. Additionally, it will give you real time updates of the status of delivery and help you to manage your fleet on ground.

Equip field sales rep with offline application

Your field sale reps may have to go to places where internet connection may not be available. If your sales rep's application is not functional without connectivity, then it may hinder the productivity of your field sales reps. For example, your application is not loading without the internet and the sales reps are not able to record the order details or generate a receipt on the go. An offline application will allow sales reps to record data without the internet. Synchronization of data can happen once they are online. It avoids delay and helps your employees to be more productive. Offline application loads immediately and takes away the frustration of the sales reps. Your sales reps don’t need to be connected to the internet to stay productive, they can play their part on the field efficiently with an offline app.

Automize field service tasks

You can automate repetitive activities to save time and streamline workflows. You can opt for a field service management software to maximize the efficiency of your team. For example, automating route optimization for multi stop deliveries and automate loading activities are great ways to increase your team’s productivity. Automation leads to speed of service and allows you to give greater customer satisfaction to your buyers. It helps you to do better with the resources you already have and scale up easily in the future. Automating routine tasks maximizes your employees’ performance.

Connect your team on a single application

Connect your drivers, sales reps, admins, and managers on a single platform. Streamlining communication is a great way to boost efficiency on the field. Everyone will know what is going on in the field with real-time updates. You’ll be able to track field activities accurately. Your field team’s accountability will also increase with improved transparency when you use a single platform.

Allow field sales reps to operate through mobile

Increase the efficiency of your field employees by giving them access to information on their smartphones. Mobile applications bring flexibility to their jobs and allow them to fulfill tasks on the go. The true essence of a field job is flexibility, mobility, and speed. A mobile application will make their job easy and give them the mobility they need. The Radius360x offline mobile application is the perfect example of an offline and mobile field sales rep app. It makes your sales reps’ job easy and makes them efficient. Another thing to keep in mind is to reduce paperwork as much as possible. Digitize and automate every possible task. The innovations in technology have made it possible to eradicate paperwork from field deliveries. Technology helps field employees to be productive and save time. We at Radius360x help businesses to increase their efficiency with the help of our solutions. We assist our customers in sales and delivery automation and help them increase the scalability of their business. Schedule a demo with us and learn more about how we can help you grow.

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Technology creates a win-win for distributors, retailers, and customers

Technology is beneficial to retailers, distributors, and consumers alike

Do you know how technology is benefiting distributors, retailers, and customers? Let us take you through the perks that evolving technology is giving to the three. The main aim of distributors and retailers in any industry is to work efficiently and serve customers better. Technology is the answer to achieve this aim. It is nothing new to say that technology increases efficiency and productivity. It also helps to speed things up by automating routine tasks. Technology helps businesses to scale up and manage increasing orders easily. Cloud technology concept, it security icons

Let’s see how technology help distributors, retailers, and customers:

Automation leads to higher productivity

Distributors and retailers are a part of the product distribution chain. The end product goes to the customer. Accurate products being in the retailers store on time depends on the distributor. Automation technology helps distributors by streamlining business functions and making workflows easy to manage. A distributor can automate repetitive tasks and focus more on expanding the business. Automation increases efficiency of both the retailers and distributors and helps to provide better service to the customer. Technology saves time and helps to speed up processes which is essential in today’s fast world. Today, order fulfillment time is a crucial factor while deciding who to buy from. The key to speeding things up is streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency.

Online ordering

Online ordering helps the customers to order at any given point as per their convenience. It also reduces a bunch of administrative work for the sales reps of distributors. Digitization of the order taking process also makes the sales process paperless and records everything automatically in a digital form. Sales reps have access to all records with just a few clicks. Retailers benefit from online ordering when they order as per their convenience from a distributor through their devices. Additionally, when the order taking and fulfillment process is digitized, the buyer can track their order in real-time and the seller is also able to give better customer service by showing real-time order updates to the buyer.

Better customer service

Customers and retailers expect fast deliveries and if you want to stay competent then fast deliveries are a must. Technology helps distributors and retailers give fast deliveries to their respective buyers. As automation streamlines all workflows like order taking, processing and fulfilling, the process of order fulfillment is faster. Technological solutions save time and increase the efficiency of the seller. Live inventory updates save retailers and distributors from situations like overstocking and understocking. Also, a lot of administrative paperwork is eliminated when inventory is counted digitally. Technological solutions save time and increase the efficiency of the seller. When distributor sales reps are freed of administrative work, they can focus more on building meaningful relationships with the retailers. This way a long-term value is created, and the distributor can grow their business easily. Allow your sales reps to create innovative sales strategies and be product experts. Burdening them with work that can be automated may hold the business back from reaching to new heights.

Multi-cloud computing

Multi cloud computing means that distributors are relying on more than one cloud vendor to meet their technical needs. Additionally, distributors get more customization options when they are not dependent on only one cloud provider. This model is also called a hybrid cloud system. Using the cloud allows businesses to scale up easily, be more agile and reduce cost. The well-known benefits of cloud technology are data accessibility from anywhere and at any given point of time. It makes communication between teams easier. Cloud technology also automates the recording of documents and reduces paperwork.

BI

Lastly, taking decisions with the help of a business intelligence dashboard helps distributors to grab growth opportunities. With the help of data, informed decisions can be taken. It helps them to identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can provide better service to the retailers. BI tools prove to be great help while making decisions that’ll affect the whole product distribution cycle. It makes data analysis easier through graphical and diagrammatic representations. Decision-makers make better sales forecasts and projections with the help of BI.

Conclusion

Technology helps distributors and retailers to attain more productivity with improved customer service. It aids in moving the product chain with efficiency and smoothness. It also helps to reduce supply chain disruptions. Technology creates a win-win situation for all. We at Radius360x supply distributors with sales and delivery automation solutions. Our offline mobile application helps the distributor, field sales reps to give greater results to the distributors. They can be productive on the field too with the help of our solutions. We also give distributors the features of live updates related to sales and inventory so that they are aware of the whole picture at all times.

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Importance of competitive market research

Why competitive market research is important

Competitors are the reason a company always strives to enhance its strategies. It is always good to have a competitive edge over other companies in your industry. This article talks about why competitive market research is important and how it helps a business.

Product differentiation Competitive research will help you differentiate your product from your competitors’ product. You can understand a better overall picture of the market and how to position your product viz a viz your competitors. Every company wants to set itself apart from its competitors, the only way of doing so is performing in-depth competitive market research. You can communicate your USP (unique selling point) in such a way that your customers remember you.

Filling the gaps in the market You get to know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors which helps in exploiting their weaknesses and positioning your product in an effective way. By doing competitive research, you find areas that your competitors are neglecting, and you can serve those areas. You find new opportunities to earn more revenue for your business. By spotting your competitor's weaknesses and gaps in the market you can explore new markets for your products and services.

Making strategies Performing a competitive analysis helps decision-makers to formulate strategies for the future. You discover where you stand in the market. Knowing your position helps you to get better by taking immediate steps. Competing with a company in the same industry motivates you to do better and make powerful strategies. Competitive market research especially helps in making marketing strategies. You can do competitive research regarding which social media platform they are using for marketing campaigns, which SEO practices they are doing, how they are targeting the customers, and more. Marketing campaigns are a major part of selling any product and analyzing what your customers are doing is essential.

Learning from the mistakes of others By analyzing what your competitors are doing and what they’ve been doing in the past, you get to know where they were successful and where they failed. With this information, you can understand what they did wrongly and avoid making those mistakes. Additionally, learning from their successful campaigns can also be useful for you. The data analysis of metrics resulting from a competitor’s successful and failed campaigns can help a company in making forecasts for the future.

Focused young businesswomen writing on virtual board. concentrated young african american female manager holding marker and making noted on chart. strategy, business and management concept

Some questions that you can find answers to are:

What type of customers are they targeting?
How is their product unique?
What are their pricing points?
What social media are they using to communicate their message?
What is unique in their website?
What type of content are they putting out?
What are the customers saying about them?
How is google ranking them?
What is their order taking process?

And other similar questions like this. You can use third-party tools too like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, SEMrush, SpyFu, Owletter, and SimilarWeb to enhance your competitive research and give you the metrics and reports you are looking for.

Conclusion

The importance of a competitive analysis cannot be emphasized enough. To keep the attention of your consumers, you need to outperform the efforts of your competitors. Competitive research helps you to do that. The dynamic business world of today presents a lot of innovative ways to make new strategies and challenge your competitors. Analyze what your competitors are doing and where you are lacking behind. The biggest advantage of a competitor analysis is that you get to know your strengths and weaknesses with respect to your competitors. Then you can leverage those strengths and improve your weaknesses to stand out from your competitors. Keep making powerful strategies and growing your business.

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Sales reps of the future

The distributor sales reps of the future are here

Your sales reps can do more purposeful work while technology takes care of the repetitive and mundane tasks. One of the core tasks of a distributor sales rep is to talk to retailers and help them grow their retail business. Because their product selling well means more orders for you in the future. The quality of this core task is often compromised when administrative work burdens sales reps. But this is gradually changing. Robust sales solutions empower sales reps and make their tasks more manageable, efficient, and faster. Let’s look at some tasks where a sales rep’s time should not go:

Counting inventory manually
Taking and entering orders
Waiting around for checks
Chasing payments
Filling up bulky paperwork
Re-entering data
Recording sales

Above mentioned tasks and similar ones are examples where traditional sales reps potentially waste their time. These duties outweigh them and stop them from pitting in creative work and creating innovative sales strategies. It was the need of the hour to reallocate sales reps’ time by supercharging them with advanced tools.

Technologies that are a boon to the sales reps are:

E-Commerce

Customers get what they want conveniently through eCommerce. The mechanism saves a lot of time for sales reps. The buyers can order directly from the website, and the sales reps don’t have to waste their time in mundane order-taking. They can use this time to build better customer relationships and prospect new buyers. Your sales reps are not solely order takers. In contrast, they are supposed to be product and sales experts. They should be consulting customers on products, advising them on how to grow their business, and equipping them with the right tools to invest their time in productive and high-priority tasks.

Cloud technology

Cloud technology has made sales jobs flexible. Salespeople can access data from anywhere, i.e., they don’t have to stick to their desks or be in the office to access data. Cloud technology is incredibly empowering for a field sales team. They can access data anytime through any device. The world of mobile sales has been possible with the help of the cloud. It also eliminates errors and delays resulting from manual processes. Cloud also makes sudden outbursts of growth easier to handle as the sales team can communicate easily and automate routine processes. The cloud keeps all information in one place, and record keeping is automated. With all records organized in one place, sales forecasts become easy and efficient. Cloud technology increases data security and speed in workflows.

Live sharing of data

There is no doubt that real-time data provides valuable insights into the whole sales process. Real-time data analysis lets the sales reps know the correct time to reach out to prospects so that sales reps get the most out of their efforts. With real-time data, sales reps can track every sales campaign or strategy your sales team has executed. For example, a sales rep can analyze the performance of an email campaign by viewing metrics like opening rate, reading time, etc. The real-time tracking of things motivates sales reps and helps them become more productive. Besides the advantages of real-time data in prospecting and converting clients, sales reps can also see how much inventory is coming in or going out. Additionally, live data gives way to immediate action taking. All problems can be detected and solved as soon as they arise.

Conclusion

These technologies are the ones that have made the traditional sales reps supercharged and ready for the future. The future sales reps are here, equipped with advanced tools and technology to help them deliver better results. Leaders have recently discussed the importance of automation and technology in sales. Every company in the market is trying to digitize its sales process to grow and accelerate its revenue. The future sales reps know how to get their repetitive and mundane tasks done through technology. While you are on the topic of supercharging sales reps and preparing them for the future, look at supporting applications for your order booking process.

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Scale your Distribution Business

5 ways to scale your distribution business

When you are stuck in one place, you don’t get time for opportunities that can help scale up your business. Running a distribution does not come without challenges, as many moving parts are involved. Distribution businesses face significant sales and inventory management challenges, satisfying customers, time management, and scaling up. Once you tackle these challenges, you get to a stage where you have streamlined workflows, fulfill orders smoothly and timely, and capitalize on opportunities you didn’t get to before. This article talks about 5 strategies that can boost the growth of your distribution business. Keep on reading to learn more. Young courier and his colleague unloading cardboard boxes from delivery van

Young courier and his colleague unloading cardboard boxes from delivery van

Here are 5 effective ways to scale your distribution business:

Streamline your order-taking process: Streamlining your order-taking process and making it online is one sure way to scale your distribution business. Taking your order-taking approach online will be a great help to your sales team as well as your customers. The convenience factor while placing any order is vitally important for any customer. With an e-commerce platform, you can allow your customers to place their orders without any hassles. Online order-taking also takes off load from your sales team as they don’t have to take calls or visits for orders anymore.
Streamline your fulfillment process: Your fulfillment process includes the part that occurs after placing the order. It includes inventory, warehouse, and delivery management. Getting live inventory updates, picking, loading, and delivery status is an essential step toward streamlining your fulfillment process. The customer receives live updates of where his order is and is not frustrated due to non-transparency. You also save your office and warehouse team the hassles of making copies, faxing, emailing, or calling about sales updates. Your team would be able to solve problems they couldn’t get to before.
Automate workflows: The importance of automation cannot be emphasized enough in today’s world. Automating administrative or routine work frees up a lot more time than you can imagine for your employees. Suppose your sales team is always over-busy with daily routine work and is not thinking of innovative sales techniques or building good human relations with your clients. In that case, it is time you invest in automation technologies. Automating your workflows increases productivity and saves time and money. You can automate your sales and delivery processes to a great extent and scale up quickly without hiring a massive number of manual workers.
Offline mobile sale app: Your field sales team will thank you for this. Can you imagine how much more your sales reps can achieve if they can take and record sales orders on the go? If you have a field salesforce, an offline mobile sales rep application is a must-do investment. It will allow them to view customer history and product prices, generate invoices, record information, and more. In addition, your sales rep would be able to perform their needful duties on the go through their mobile phones even without an internet connection. Equipping them with a mobile application is a way to scale your distribution business. Your field sales team will be able to give you more results while becoming self-sufficient in their jobs.
Increase CLV: The last and one of the most important ways to scale your distribution business is to increase your CLV (Customer lifetime value). CLV is an important metric that estimates how many sales customers are likely to make throughout their relationship with a company. Every manager must aim to improve the CLV value as greater CLV means more profit for the business. Some practical ways of increasing CLV are: provide high-quality customer support, sell superior (quality-wise) products, make onboarding easy, upsell and cross-sell to existing customers, and keep delivering value to your customers. Learn more about CLV.

These were some ways for you to scale up your distribution business. Keep scaling up and generating more revenue. We at Radius360x provide small and medium companies with sales and delivery automation solutions. Equipping your employees with vital tools for growth is essential for growing your company. We empower your employees by automating their routine tasks and providing them functionally rich solutions to do their jobs in a better way. We offer distributors with customized apps that improve operational efficiency and productivity. Talk with us to learn more about how we can help you grow your distribution business.

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Cyber security tips for the F&B industry

Cyber Security Tips For Food And Beverage industry

With the increased usage of digital technology in business courses, all industries have become prone to cyber-attacks. The food and beverage industry is no different. These threats and attacks have increased in the food and beverage industry. And most companies aren't prepared for cyber attacks the way they should be. F&B companies must take cyber security seriously to avoid unfavorable situations. For example, a cyber attack can make your business come to a halt if you don't prepare for the same in advance. As a food and beverage company, you must have loads of customer data which you are obliged to keep safe. Here are some tips that can help you manage cyber attacks in a better way:

Make it an important topic of discussion: The most common mistake related to cyber security is that many businesses don't make it a matter of debate in their decision-making process. Your primary documents and core meetings must discuss the importance of cybersecurity if you want to protect your data. It would be best to examine the areas where a cyber attack can happen. This process is similar to performing a risk assessment.
Create mock cyber attacks and discuss necessary actions: Do your employees know what steps to take in case of a data breach? Discuss simulated situations of cyberattacks with your team and discuss the activities that you will take to rectify the situation. Create awareness about cyber threats among your employees and tell them all the possible cyber events. Food and beverage industries that take cyber security seriously have an incident response team that collaborates with the risk management department to manage cyber attacks.
Change what needs to be changed: Run a security check on all the software applications you currently use. If the tools you use are not secure, consider changing them for more secure options. F&B industries rely heavily on software for customer relationship management, payroll, ERP, inventory management, etc. Evaluate the level of cyber security your vendors are providing you. This action is essential as a cyber attack can cost you time and money, stop production, steal sensitive client data, and other situations you want to avoid.
Intrusion detection software: An AI-based software that alerts you before a cyberattack may be a good investment. Cybersecurity tools can also detect an unauthorised entry into the system and alert you. Some applications that food and beverage industries can use to deal with cyberattacks and increase security are linked here.
Cloud-based ERP: Cloud technology is the safest platform to store information. An ERP system holds most of your data and can be a prime target for hackers. Making your ERP secure should be one of the significant steps towards being protected from cyberattacks. Cloud ERP will track all your activity and fully encrypt your data. Additionally, it will ensure that only authorised people are always accessing the information. You don't even have to employ an in-house IT staff to deploy a cloud ERP as the vendor maintains all the necessary servers. Choose a cloud provider who keeps cyber security a top priority to ensure your information is protected.
Cybersecurity insurance: Taking insurance against cyber threats may help a great deal in coping with the losses due to a cyber attack. For example, if you face a ransomware situation, insurance can help a lot in offsetting some of the losses. Insurance will protect your company's money against cyber attacks like email spoofing, identity theft, phishing, and IT theft loss.

Business corporate protection safety security concept

Once an attack happens, your incident response team must retrieve all evidence of the episode to determine how it happened. Doing this practice will allow you to protect yourself from a similar situation in the future. Additionally, you'll be able to provide evidence if the cyber attack goes into the hands of the authorities. A cyber attack may cause your business losses that could have been avoided by taking the proper steps. Don't wait for a cyber attack to take the necessary security actions. Make cyber security a priority and protect your system and data. Cyber risk is a business risk and its needs to be taken seriously. Make sure that you have taken proper security measures. You can also make a checklist of standards to meet while checking your cyber security and take help from third-party cyber security auditors, they can periodically check your system for loopholes. The food and beverage industry is one such industry where cyber security cannot be compromised. We need to make sure that the systems are protected from unauthorized intervention and that all changes in the system are closely monitored. Cyber attacks can easily cause damages up to millions of dollars so it's better to take precaution rather than regretting later. Also, the cost required to invest in cyber security is nothing when compared to the loss a cyber attack may cause to the business. Let’s stay cyber secure. -by Nivedita Verma

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ERP: it’s Affordability & Benefits

How affordability and ERP can go hand in hand for SMEs

Being a business owner comes with the responsibility of wisely utilizing the firm's financial resources. Now, you might have to calculate what investments you should make to make your business profitable. Investing in technology for the growth of your business is the best thing you can do for your company in today's world. We all know that technology helps us achieve more, do tasks quickly, streamline workflows, reduce manual work, and much more. Using software applications for different business functions can be the best or the worst thing you could do for your business. It can be the best when you can sync information from all applications and use it to manage everything on a single platform. The worst-case scenario would be that you accidentally formed data silos, and finding relevant information is a big hassle. The latter situation would result in annoyance and increased manual work. The solution to avoid such a situation is to invest in an ERP(enterprise resource planning) system.

What is an ERP?

An ERP system maintains data used across the organization on a single database. It builds an integrated system for connecting all workflows of people in an organization, also collect data from different departments and generate reports according to your specific needs. It will let you manage all your daily activities like accounting, project management, performance management, supply chain management, financials, marketing, sales, e-commerce, and any other function you can think of. ERP systems are considered the one-stop solution for increasing efficiency and profitability.

Is an ERP too expensive for you?

Have you not yet invested in ERP software because it was too expensive? If you feel that ERP software is too expensive for you, then maybe you have not found the right one. Today we have solutions that allow businesses of all sizes to grow with affordability. You can enjoy the same features at affordable rates because of technological advancements. Times have changed. You no longer need to buy heavy hardware or invest in a full-blown IT team to deploy ERP software. Innovations like cloud, SaaS, and subscription-based fees have made implementing an ERP affordable for businesses of all sizes. Moreover, your business might highly require the benefits of an ERP and lets you know and analyzes how you utilize the firm's resources. It ties together your different business processes and enables data flow between them. Moreover, it makes reporting and data analysis easier for decision-makers. You can have an overall picture of what's happening in the organization in real-time. An ERP enhances your integration and visibility. The ROI of an ERP system is much higher than we view it.

Here are some benefits of using an ERP system for small and medium businesses:

Scalability

If an organization depends wholly on manual work, then it won't be able to handle a sudden growth surge. The automation provided by an ERP system helps businesses to scale up quickly and frees the employees of manual work to address other strategic tasks.

Reporting

Custom reporting is one of the core advantages of an ERP system. An ERP collects data from across the departments of an organization and makes custom reports whenever you need. Custom reporting makes tracking the KPIs of all the departments easier, and you can see which areas need improvements clearly with the benefit of an ERP. It becomes the single platform available for everyone in the organization to compile and house data and generate custom reports whenever needed.

Better decision making

With better reporting comes better decision-making. An ERP also makes data more accessible and shows real-time data to decision-makers. It gives agility to organizations as they can quickly react to changes in the business environment. For instance, managing the supply chain through an ERP will show any discrepancies occurring in real time so that you can take quick action.

Automation

An ERP reduces human error through automation. Suppose you don't have an ERP system; you rely on your employees to re-enter the data again and again whenever required. You are making your organizational processes prone to manual errors. You can skip errors like missed inventory, miscommunication, or missed sales orders with an ERP system being the backbone of your business. Besides, you want your customers to rely on you, so the more errors you can eliminate, the better.

Cost-effective

Having an ERP reduces costs. Your employees are free of manual work and can now concentrate on projects that can generate profit for the organization. Also, the workflows become smooth and flow consistently, reducing turnaround time and increasing production speed and capabilities. An ERP also helps to prevent delays and disruptions caused by a lack of accurate and real-time information. Additionally, streamlining workflows reduces costs in the long run.

Proper planning and resource management

Availability of accurate information and custom reporting leads to proper planning. An ERP provides valuable insights into all departments making it easier to predict sales, cost, and needed resources. Better planning leads to better resource management, and hence a firm is better able to allocate and manage its resources.

Conclusion

No matter the size of your business, investing in ERP may help you be more productive, efficient, and profitable. Besides the above features, ERP is beneficial for companies that constantly have products coming in and going out. It can help you keep track of individual inventory and simplify supply chain management. Seeing the benefits of ERP systems, it is an investment that you should consider making.

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Supporting applications to enhance your order booking process

Tools to enhance your order booking process

Improving operational efficiency is essential in today's world; having the right tools help achieve it. An order booking tool helps achieve efficiency in the order booking process. It helps manage orders optimally so that order management goes hand in hand with the business flow. Using technology to complete the order booking process makes the whole process streamlined and easy. Additionally, scaling up your business is smooth when you can easily handle all the orders. An order booking tool help field sales reps a great deal. It increases a sales rep's productivity to a great extent. It allows them to customize catalogs, take orders seamlessly, keep sales records, save time, improve revenue, upsell, and more. Besides an order booking tool, there are other supporting applications and tools that can enhance the performance of your employees.

Close-up of man's hand using his mobile phone

Here are some supporting applications that field sales reps can utilize alongside an order booking tool:

BI Reporting

In simple words, a BI tool makes data analysis easier for decision-makers. Vast amounts of data from different sources can be challenging to read, and compiling it to understand can be a tedious and time-consuming task for a human. You don't need to spend extra time as you can deploy a BI tool that generates actionable reports for quick and informed decision-making. A BI tool makes accurate sales forecasts and projections. Sales reps can benefit hugely from a BI application. They can also track customer behavior and purchase history and design their promotional strategies based on relevant data with a history of customer purchases. The Radius360x BI tool provides decision makers with an insight dashboard that provides real-time actionable information. It can also show them industry insights and top-selling products.

Sales Rep Application

Real-time sales updates for your business, inventory management, picking, and loading are excellent support for field sales reps and warehouse managers. They have an accurate report of inventory in hand, no. of sales done, payment status, picking and loading update, and much more. It provides immense help in proper warehouse management. The Radius3660x Sales Rep Application provides powerful sales solutions for your field sales reps. It helps them schedule calls and visits and makes customized catalogs for the customers. It also allows real-time sales updates for your business and can be operated through mobile devices. It gives you features like an order guide, customer history, inventory details, list of products, client notes, contact details, customized product catalog, analysis of sales, etc., to increase operational efficiency by reducing order taking time. Real-time data analysis makes organizations agile and aids them in taking action as quickly as possible in case of disruptions. It also helps in increasing productivity and speed of doing business. You can enhance your customer service by tracking the order feature.

Delivery Route planner

A delivery route planner finds the most optimized and cost-effective route for fleet drivers. The benefits of this application include timely deliveries, cost savings, going paperless, an ideal way for multi-stop deliveries, and much more. The managers manage their fleet on the ground effect on a single platform, and they can add critical factors like traffic, road congestion, etc., to adjust routes accordingly. You also get live updates when truck loading, invoicing, and delivery, and live updates help you keep better track of goods. Drivers can also update the deliveries, generate and print invoices on the go. Our delivery route partner application is integrated with google maps, showing drivers the ideal journey for multi-stop deliveries. This solution also helps in returning and picking up damaged goods effectively. Both live updates and delivery route planners are essential tools for warehouse management. Thus, helping in avoiding unnecessary supply chain disruptions.

Vendor Depletion

A vendor is not just a supplier of goods but also a partner in the long-term success of your business. The reporting between a vendor and a distributor must be smooth, detailed, and readily available. The Radius360x mobile app makes sure that the supply chain is working efficiently. A vendor depletion tool allows the vendor/supplier to log in anytime and views their item or brand-specific depletion reports. This tool lets vendors view depletion reports for up to 12 months. They can also view sales rep account, brand, or item information. You can also create additional pieces for specific vendors if and when required. This tool saves sales reps time as they don't have to assist vendors whenever a report is required personally. The vendors can log in with their login id and view any sales information they want; it is a hassle-free process for both the vendors and the field sales reps.

E-Commerce Solution

E-commerce solutions allow your customers to place orders anytime, anywhere, with just a few clicks. It has a user-friendly interface and easy add-to-cart and product list options. You can also provide customized integrations for your clients in this tool. This saves the sales reps much time as they don't have to take orders on call or physically. Customers can place orders themselves without any hassle, and sales reps can invest their saved time in strategic work. Schedule a demo with our team to know more about our solutions. All our solutions are tailor-made for the challenges faced by our clients. These supporting applications enhance the order booking process and increase the users' productivity. We believe in building solutions that help our clients achieve more and scale their businesses. Let us streamline and automate your workflows for the growth of your business.

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Switch from paper to online order taking

5 benefits of online order taking process

In today’s business world, it is crucial to increase the efficiency and pace of workflows. Moving to digital solutions helps improve productivity and minimize errors. Paper-based processes are not hassle-free, consuming employees’ extra time and creating barriers to real-time data analysis. Switching from paper to online order-taking can prove immensely beneficial for any business. Keep on reading to know more about the benefits of online order taking over paper-based order taking.

Here are 5 benefits of switching from paper to online order taking:

Real-time data access

It is impossible to see real-time sale updates using a paper-based sales process. Most of the time, decision-makers don’t have real-time information straight away while using paper. As a result, they can’t get a clear picture of what is going on in the organization at the moment. With an online order-taking system, live updates related to sales, inventory, delivery, etc., can be seen and analyzed. Digital processes allow employees to access real-time data from anywhere and anytime, and real-time analysis provides accurate and timely results. Any operational function can be enhanced and made more productive with access to real-time data.

Increased operational efficiency

You don’t want your employees to spend precious time searching for documents. Besides this, they also have to do double data entry, print, distribute the papers, do manual data checks, and other things. The online ordering system automates all this and increases the operational efficiency of several workflows. Employees can find any record with just a few clicks. All the required information is available immediately, and there is no waste of time and resources.

Better integration

Suppose you have digital bookkeeping software, and your sales process is paper-based. You need to perform extra steps to feed the information on paper into the bookkeeping software. An online order-taking system can record your bookkeeping entries digitally without hassle. Paper-based processes are a hindrance to smooth integration. While on the other hand, online ordering makes it easy. Integrating your software applications with each other is essential to get the most out of them. Operational efficiency and productivity can be increased drastically with integrated workflows.

Better traceability and reliable backups

It isn’t easy to create reliable backups for paper-based processes. You’ll have to manually store the documents in a safe and organized place or feed all the information into computers. Both of these ways are time-consuming and do not align with the digital transformation the business world is going through. Online ordering allows storing data about all sales orders digitally on the computers of relevant people. Reliable backups can be created automatically without any manual input. With reliable backups come better traceability. You can go back into the records and find out who the salesperson and customer were, what the order was when it was shipped, and the delivery status.

Faster and better order fulfillment

An online ordering system can create customized catalogs for your customers based on previous sales records. This process will be tedious if you still use a paper-based sales process. Digital order processing is faster than processing orders on paper which means you can fulfill orders faster. The Radius360x sales rep application gives users real-time sales and inventory updates and helps them stay on track with what is happening. It also allows the field sales rep to create customized catalogs for customers. Our e-commerce solution gives your customers the convenience of ordering online with just a click. Online order-taking is also much more scalable compared to a paper order-taking process. Digital workflow transformation can help the business earn more profits and lower costs. All companies aim for excellent operational efficiency, and digital solutions help them achieve it. We provide our clients with ordering, reporting, and digital tracking tools that help them streamline their sale and delivery processes. Streamlining and automating processes using our solutions helps our clients in functioning at the speed of their business with increased productivity. Schedule a demo with us to know more about how we can help you grow your business. -by Nivedita Verma

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Radius360x Mobile Application

Radius360x Comes To Your Pocket With An All-New Mobile App

We have been delivering value to our customers with desktop applications but now Radius360x has come to your pocket with an all-new mobile app. Indigo Olive’s flagship product Radius360x mobile application is cross-platform across Apple, Android, and Windows. We specialize in helping our customers streamline their businesses’ sales and delivery processes. We have built tools that help distributors or wholesalers with ordering, reporting, and digital tracking.

Greater Productivity With The Mobile App

Want to place and modify orders on the go even when offline? We are here for your rescue. You can manage orders even without the internet on our all-new mobile application. The biggest advantage of the Radius360x mobile application would be the ease of using it. You don’t have to worry about having a monitor to manage your business functions. It provides you with full accessibility. Handling your business through your mobile gives greater productivity, more data accessibility, and better connectivity. Let’s look at what we offer.

Radius360x Product Solutions

Indigo Olive aims to automate sales and delivery processes for Small and Medium scale businesses and provide a hassle free solution for managing your team on the field. Video Link- https://youtu.be/8RVJOoSw9sM We offer the following products to streamline your sales functions.

1. Streamline Your Sales Process With Our Sales Rep Application

A sales rep application that aids your field sales rep to deliver the best results. Your sales reps can place orders and view real time sales and inventory updates on the application. You can also customize catalogs for your customers giving each customer a satisfactory experience. Schedule calls and visits seamlessly through the application and also view customer history and order guides. Our application can be seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks and it has in-built integrated cloud connectivity.

2. Manage Your Fleet On Ground With Our Route Planner App

This app allows you to optimize deliveries routes for your fleet and get the most out of deliveries without wasting resources. It is a multi stop route planner that finds the most cost-effective route for multiple deliveries. Additionally, you can go paperless with your delivery management. You can also manage invoices, collect payments and print them through Bluetooth printers and handle everything digitally. Automate truck loading and pick-up easily and also get live updates of deliveries. This application can be integrated with Fintech and VIP.

3. Make Better Decisions With Our Insight Analysis Dashboard: BI Reporting Tool

We all know the significance of the increasing role of technology in business reporting. It helps decision-makers to save time and make strategic decisions with greater efficiency. Our BI tool helps with sales projections and forecasts with the help of AI. You can generate reports related to employee efficiency, customer, trending products, market trends, and even customized reports. It turns all your quantitative data into understandable reports for better analysis. Our application also contains pre ready report templates for your ease. In simple words, this BI tool is a functionally rich insight analysis dashboard that helps businesses make informed decisions. It turns complex quantitative data into easy to understand reports that are actionable so that quick action can be taken.

4. Sample Management

Sample products are sent for events, tasting, product launches, etc. But managing the process might become a highly unorganized and wasteful procedure without a proper system in place. Through our application, field sales reps can place sample product orders and request for admin approval of the same. Admins can create a periodic budget for sales reps and coordinate on sampling campaigns effectively. Sales reps can modify orders on the go and also set rebates and discounts on samples.

Schedule A Demo

We understand that one solution doesn’t fit all therefore we offer our customers personalized app solutions. Being a customer-driven company, we put our everyday effort goes into enhancing the value that our customers receive from our product We don’t just hold your hands at the onboarding but assist you in your daily business needs. We help you focus on other areas that need your attention by automating your entire sales process. Book a demo with us to know more about how Radiux360x can help you upscale your business!

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SaaS Integration: Approaches, Comparison, & it's Challenges

What is SaaS integration?

SaaS integration refers to connecting one SaaS application to another cloud-based software or an on-premise system of an enterprise. Communicating between those applications is necessary if a business uses several SaaS applications. The integration allows seamless exchange of information between several platforms, which is much-needed for streamlined workflows in a company. Suppose one application cannot communicate with another used by the same organization. In that case, the formation of data silos and manual work for the employees will increase enormously. A large company may use CRM, ERP, finance, and marketing applications. When it buys another SaaS application for some other function, the first question that any user will ask is whether they can sync data from the application to their different applications or not. SaaS integration becomes essential with many SaaS applications and a massive volume of data. This article talks about four approaches to SaaS integration, SaaS integration challenges, and a comparison of SaaS integration with other integration types.

Critical approaches in SaaS integration

Opening API endpoints to third parties

In this approach of SaaS integration, the SaaS vendor opens its API endpoints for third parties to use. Third parties include value-added resellers (VARs), managed service providers (MSPs), direct customers, professional service providers, and independent developers. They use the API endpoints to connect the SaaS product with other applications and systems. This approach takes off the load from the SaaS provider of maintaining integrations and focusing on its core product. But the disadvantage here is that the SaaS company has no control over the quality of SaaS integrations. When the end-users of the SaaS product face issues, they're more likely to blame the SaaS product first. Suppose the customer is responsible for the integrations. In that case, the concept of customer care fails a bit, and if the SaaS vendor updates its APIs, then the user will also have to update their integration system.

Coding native integrations manually.

Many SaaS companies build the integrations that they serve within the SaaS application. This approach ensures that the SaaS vendor controls the integrations' quality, security, and customer experience. Additionally, as SaaS companies know their customers' challenges, they are more likely to build integrations best suited to their needs. The problem with this approach is that a point comes when the SaaS company needs to decide whether to put its resources into developing and improving its SaaS product or into maintaining integrations. Also, as the number of connected systems grows, scalability and maintenance become more and more difficult. This method has its advantages but is the most time and resource-consuming.

Directing customers to an independent integration tool provider

This method is also a general approach to SaaS integration. The SaaS vendor directs the user to an existing integration tool like Zapier or IFTTT. These service providers already enable connectivity for many SaaS applications in the market. The SaaS vendors build their integrations and publish them on these platforms, allowing them to avail several integration use cases. The SaaS vendor saves up on resources and also has control over the quality and maintenance. Here the end-user is responsible for configuring SaaS integration flows. The issues arise when the integration use cases become complex and the tools cannot handle them. Also, if you are dealing with high-volume data, providing any ROI to your buyers is challenging as it is not cost-effective. Another problem is that the customers may get confused about whom to reach out to in case of technical issues.

Building and offering native integrations through an embedded iPaaS tool

iPaaS stands for integration platform as a service; this is a relatively new approach to SaaS integration. iPaaS vendors provide SaaS companies with customizable integrations that are configuration-based. SaaS brands sell these integrations within the SaaS product under their name. iPaaS solutions enable buyers to build a connected enterprise for smooth workflows. This approach allows SaaS vendors to control quality, security, and customer satisfaction. Vendors are also not required to use their resources for maintaining integrations. The biggest perk of this approach is that users can easily tackle use cases of any level of complexity. The challenges with this method are: iPaaS tools are complex, and learning how to use them can be difficult. It is easier and cheaper to code SaaS integrations manually than to deploy an iPaaS. Manual coding should be preferred over iPaaS if use cases are simple and the number of integrations is small.

Difference between SaaS integration, App integration, and API integration

All these terms may sound different, but we can use them interchangeably. API is a set of codes that allows programs to communicate with each other by sending and receiving data. Before the rise of iPaaS, enterprises required a developer to assist with API integration, and iPaaS has made it much easier to integrate apps without technical knowledge.

SaaS integration challenges

Cost

While doing integrations, a company can proceed in two ways: it can use tools or devote technical resources toward SaaS integration. Technical resources will either be internal or external, but using these resources will not be cost-effective for the company. Instead, businesses can use these resources for other revenue-generating activities. Tools here refer to the integration platforms in the market, and they make your SaaS integration easy, fast, and flexible.

Time

Setting up integrations will take up the company's time, but this time is necessary. Spending appropriate time setting up integrations is essential to avoid problems in the future. Organizations can speed up the time-to-value ratio by leveraging pre-built integrations, having subject matter experts assist them, and setting up integrations in a manner that is easy to use.

The spread of SaaS

Today's organizations use many SaaS applications to make their daily processes smooth and efficient. When a company uses several SaaS applications, it becomes essential to integrate them holistically. A potential challenge in SaaS integration is to combine several SaaS applications to avoid the possibility of data silos and chaotic manual processes. Big companies use a dozen SaaS applications and making communication easy is the most significant pain point SaaS integration solves. SaaS integration is beneficial for both the buyer and the vendor. SaaS vendors will be able to sell more of their products if they can exchange information with other applications easily. Providing a great customer experience is easy when your product is integrable. As a SaaS user, the integration creates excellent value as users can combine data from one application to another and work hassle-free. The integration allows users to get the most out of their SaaS applications. SaaS applications will continue to create value for today's businesses, and as more and more enterprises adopt SaaS technology, integration will become necessary.

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Beverage Distribution Industry Trends In 2022

The United States' beverage industry is worth $146 Billion (including non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages). The sale of alcoholic beverages brings in around $253 billion each year, and the sale of non-alcoholic beverages generates around $415 million yearly. The pandemic made businesses realize the importance of digitization. Distributors started adopting technology for their business processes. Due to social distancing and curfews, sellers had to find ways to connect with their buyers and keep selling their goods. This was done through e-commerce websites and social media networks. Digitization was necessary pre-pandemic, too, but it was not mandatory, but things changed. Also, the increase in consumerism forced businesses to improve their customer service. Customers want fast deliveries, regular updates, answers to queries, and a satisfactory resolution to issues in orders. Today's customers won't hesitate to shift to your competitor if unsatisfied with your customer service. The tested agility of the organizations is high during the pandemic, and their survival depends on how well they adjusted to the changing circumstances. So it's important to know what are the beverage distribution industry trends that are important to have a competitive edge. Free Man and Woman Standing While Holding Pitchers Stock Photo

Free Man and Woman Standing While Holding Pitchers Stock Photo

Here are some trends in the Beverage Distribution Industry for 2022:

Automation

Automation is playing a significant role in businesses today. Business owners are handling inventory, samples, orders, deliveries, etc., with automation and for all the good reasons. Several workflows can be streamlined for the ease of doing business. For example, CRM (Customer relationship management) software can automate follow-up emails sent to your customers. When automation is in use, employees don't have to waste time doing tedious business tasks, and they can use technology to increase their productivity and speed. Automation also allows beverage distribution businesses to derive valuable insights that help them to make better decisions.

Online Ordering

More and more beverage distributors have been adopting digital handling of sales orders. For example, distributors invest in an order management system that tracks orders throughout their lifecycle, from being ordered to being shipped. Customers can order through different channels and update the inventory in real time. Customers also find ordering through e-commerce channels more convenient than physically calling, mailing, or going. Online ordering helps record all orders automatically and improves customer service as customers get updated on every stage of their order's processing.

Sustainable packaging

People of today are welcoming sustainable alternatives to conventional things. The question arises- Why not choose sustainable packaging wherever we can? This action benefits the environment, society, and business, reduces harmful environmental waste, and enhances the company's social image. Customers want more transparency about where the products are coming from and what methods the manufacturers use for production. The same responsibility falls on the distributors, too, in terms of packaging and delivery. Sustainable methods are an edge over competitors.

Cloud

Cloud allows businesses to effectively perform end-to-end operations like supply chain management with increased productivity. Integrating the cloud eliminates manual work in tasks like documentation and processing of approvals. Scaling of business is easy with cloud technology at your disposal. It doesn't require you to invest in more hardware or heavy technology. You can buy a subscription that meets your current requirements from your cloud vendor. Business data also becomes more accessible with the cloud because of 24/7 availability and the benefit of accessing it from anywhere.

CBD and ABV

CBD stands for Cannabidiol, and ABV stands for Alcohol By Volume. Low or no ABV beverages have started gaining popularity among consumers. This type formed in the beer industry and has now spread to the spirits and wine industry. As ABV came into the spotlight, customers also became aware of CBD infusions. Beverage marketers are introducing CBD-infused drinks into the market. The FDA has not approved CBD infusions, but some critics say that consumption of these types of drinks probably doesn't cause any negative impact on the health of an individual.

Supply chain management and handling disruptions

Another important thing that the pandemic taught us is that we should always be prepared for supply chain disruptions. Distributors started focusing more on supply chain optimization post-pandemic as they realized its importance. Some things that could optimize the supply chain are: keeping a safety stock after analyzing how much could be required, getting real-time inventory updates, diversifying suppliers, and not making your supply chain dependent on one or two vendors, etc. Businesses started using software applications like BI to analyze and predict and adopted technology for inventory management and route optimization. When you are better prepared for supply chain disruptions, you can keep your customers happy and act immediately in case of problems. The beverage distribution industry continues to grow and it is safe to say that more and more distributors have started adopting technology to grow their business. Buyers have adjusted well to e-commerce, and this trend will continue in the future too. It offers buyers the convenience of ordering from anywhere and anytime through any device. Trends keep changing with time, and as a business, you need to keep up with them because you don't want to lag. Check out this order management system guide if you are interested in scaling your business through proper order management.

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Order Management System Guide 101

Suppose you are a newbie business owner selling prime quality products. Yet, your customers might be facing some issues. For instance, delay in deliveries, update on damaged products, etc. It could be avoided with a proper Order Management System.

What is an Order Management System (OMS)?

An Order Management System is an essential part of operations for e-commerce and other businesses. Modern order management is more complex than earlier. But, it becomes easier to handle the supply chain with OMS as it’s an interconnected ecosystem. It allows you to set up & manage disparate systems conveniently. As a result, you get the opportunity to scale up your business. It increases B2C and multichannel distribution. Therefore, retailers should gear up to handle the allocation of all channels. An OSM connects almost every facet of a business's operation.

What are the steps of the Order Management System Process?

You are highly mistaken if you think the Order Management System includes only fulfilling and shipping items. To satisfy customers, smooth synchronization of the Order Management System and constant communication are necessary. Here's the detailed process of an Order Management System.

Order Placed

The process starts when a customer places an order online, in-store, or over a call. Here the order gets logged in to the online platform, with the payment terms, delivery place & time.

Order Checked

In the second step, a connected system or warehouse manager checks the order against the inventory ledger to confirm if they are in a position to fulfill the order. If an inventory is low, additional inventory is purchased from the vendor via ERP or another purchasing platform.

Order Logged

The next step comprises logging the order in an accounting ledger, which is done by a connected system or finance manager. The order is recorded as cash or account receivable according to the order and payment terms. An invoice is generated and which is sent to the customer at this stage.

Order- Transferred

Here, the order is transferred to the fulfillment partner. In the case of an eCommerce order, the partner purchases a shipping label through a carrier, and he picks it up and delivers it to the customer. But if it's a wholesale order, you need to coordinate with the shipping provider to pick up and deliver the order.

Order Shipped

Lastly, the fulfilment partner updates you about the shipped order via a connected system. The payment is made as per pre-decided terms. Also, the connected system updates the ledger account with the payment. Free People Sitting at the Table Stock Photo

Free People Sitting at the Table Stock Photo

How can an Order Management System help you?

Track all Orders

If your small e-commerce business is growing, then the Order Management System is exactly what you need to handle orders. With OMS, the process from placing to receiving an order becomes less complex for both the brand and its customer. It provides a streamlined and seamless customer experience. A firm can sell through various channels with an Order Management System that tracks and records orders more effectively and productively. It secures order errors, customer dissatisfaction, and lost revenue because of late updates.

Streamline & Automate operations

Order Management System is completely automated. So it decreases human errors in orders and invoicing, saving time & money. Also, the time saved can be used in analyzing the data.

Enhances Inventory Management

With the real-time capabilities of the Order Management System, you can distribute shipment-related data. As a result, inventory management becomes easy with OMS. Besides enhancing inventory accuracy, it protects companies from overselling inventory and bringing utmost customer satisfaction.

Decreases your expenditure

Order Management System is one in all substitute for your separate accounting system. For instance, software for inventory management, marketing, shipping, and customer service. You can manage all these things in a unified Order Management System. Moreover, it gives you the option to compare shipping rates of national and regional logistics too. You can save money by choosing the best pocket-friendly option.

24/7 Availability of Data

You can access your Order Management System online from any location. It leads to stronger data control, enhanced customer service, and efficient order processing. Besides this, the real-time data display makes your company proactive to any issues.

Choose the right Order Management System

Now you have a fair idea of how the Order Management System can change your company’s order processing. The next step is to choose the right OMS for your company. But before that, you need to consider the following things:

Integration

Although an Order Management System system is a one in all system for various accounting departments, it still requires integration with third-party sales or marketing platforms. You must consider. Along with considering whether integration is built direct or indirectly, you must also check whether it is managed in-house or outsourced. Analyzing these things could help you bring reliability and efficiency to your system. The best OMS system doesn’t demand change in your whole existing setup.

Impact on Supply Chain

Your business is dependent on suppliers, distributors, or third-party logistics. So you must see how an Order Management System is going to affect your whole supply chain. Maybe the new OMS makes processing orders from suppliers more difficult or it may not allow you to use a third-party logistics provider. In this case, looking for an alternative system is advisable.

Reporting & Analytics

Data is the new oil in the modern world. To ensure that the Order Management System provides high reporting capabilities, it should allow you to monitor product and channel performance periodically. It must give you the power to forecast data-driven demands. Besides this, it must provide customer information to enhance marketing campaigns. OMS offering depth of reporting should be on your priority list.

Scalability

All small business owners dream of turning their brainchild into a large company. If you are one of them, think about what changes you will be making while your company scales up. You may have to increase the number of platforms or the order volume. Picturing your long-term goal while selecting the Order Management System will help you find the most reliable one.

Service

When choosing an Order Management System, consider what services they are providing. Clarify with the OMS vendor whether they will provide assistance and manage your switchover? Will they provide training sessions on the new setup for your employees? Considering the longer term, the vendor should provide 24/7 support. Plus, consultation should be there to optimize workflows and instill best practices. Once you take into consideration all the above-stated things, firstly, you need to discuss & analyze the goals and objectives in upgrading your system. Secondly, draft a proposal stating exactly what you need from the OMS. Include order volumes, sales channels, and plans in the proposal. Thirdly, send this proposal to the best vendors you find after researching them properly. Fourthly, compare the offerings of all the vendors who replied to your proposal and choose the best possible Order Management System. Lastly, closely work with the vendor to succeed with their OMS software.

Conclusion

However, the cost of installation and updates of an OMS can be expensive. So, small business owners pick the option of outsourcing it. If you are also looking for someone to run your order management system, schedule a quick demo now!

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B2B sales strategy framework for your business

B2B Sales Strategy Framework For Maximum Revenue: The Ultimate Guide

Your product or service is top-notch and can solve the problems of your target audience. But here comes the more significant challenge- creating a B2B sales strategy framework that will work. Your revenue is directly dependent on your sales and your company's future. Knowing how to plan your sales process to get the maximum results is crucial. Let's find out more about B2B sales strategy! You will find a method and 3 bonus tips to up-level your sales process.

Why is it essential to build a proper B2B strategy?

B2B sales process is where one business sells products or services to another company. It is essential to build a proper B2B sales strategy that your sales team will follow so that you can generate effective results without wasting resources and everyone knows what to do. Your marketing campaigns and full-proof plans can go to waste without a proper sales strategy.

An 8-step process to build a solid B2B sales strategy.

Research your target audience

The first step in designing any marketing or sales campaign is getting to know the people you want to target. Research what kind of businesses they have and the challenges they are trying to solve. Make customer personas based on your research in this process. These customer personas are artificial that reflect the characteristics of the people you want to sell to. Your sales reps can show better understanding and empathy when they know the person and their business problems. Some ways to research are client interviews, customer surveys, and social media engagement. You can also study the existing customers by collecting data from your sales team. Dig deep to know the pain points of your target audience so that you can offer to solve them in the best possible way.

Analyze the market and competitors

This step involves analyzing market trends and your competitors. Research your target market and find out how you need to place your product there. Your competitors are the already available substitutes for your product in the market, and therefore, you need to know their strengths and weaknesses to pitch your product better. Look at whom your competitors are selling to and how they do it. Find your competitors' weak spots and overlooked areas in the market to leverage them. To analyze your competition, you can check out their website, marketing campaigns, social media, reviews, etc.

Design a compelling USP

You will have to find a way to stand out from your competitors. Today's customers are well educated, especially when you're in the B2B market, and they have internet resources to research the product and analyze all their options. People will buy from you only when they find you give them more value than your competitors. You need to know what pain points you are trying to solve, how you will solve them, why your product is relevant to your target audience, how you will provide customer support, etc. you will have this data if you did the first and second step correctly. Then you need to place these points appealingly to show how you are different from the rest in the industry. Portray your message through social media, newsletters, blogs, and other content forms. Don't focus on your product's features; focus on how these features will benefit your customers. Convey what change your product can bring to your customer's business.

Start building a customer relationship.

Map out how you will make the first conversation with them and how to grab their attention. B2B buyers are very skeptical of sales reps, so if you lose credibility in the initial stages, buyers won't waste their precious time on you as there are other sellers. You can automate your marketing and sales processes to get important metrics like open email rates, video views, website activity, etc. You can reach out to people who seem interested in your product. After reaching out, you can take them through the stages of your sales funnel. Based on which stage of the sales funnel they are at, you can send them the right sources and call to action.

Qualify leads

Not all prospects are relevant enough to put your time into. It would help if you filtered out hot and cold leads so that your efforts are directed in the most productive direction. Only 27% of the prospects are qualified leads. It is bad to put in the effort and realize later that they don't have the budget to buy from you. Therefore, it is better to match your prospects with the ideal buyer personas you have in mind. CRM software applications are used for lead management. These applications let you know what actions your leads have taken and also help you rank your leads. You can assign the hot leads to best-performing sales reps to convert them to clients and put the dead tips in the reengagement category. A CRM helps you to do much more than this. Read more here.

Pitch to the relevant leads

Tailor a personalized pitch for every relevant prospect. It is more productive to pitch nicely to a few highly pertinent prospects than to waste resources and generalize pitches to a broader audience. Make personalized pitches that address the specific pain points of your prospects. You can pitch through live video conferences, calls, in-person, and emails but make sure you talk more about the customer and the value he is getting instead of speaking mundane details about your company and the product. Customers care less about the products' features and more about what benefit they are getting from them.

Follow-up

The key is in the follow-up. But following up with your B2B buyers is also a dilemma for the sales reps as B2B buyers are business people who remain busy and may get annoyed with excessive follow-up calls or messages. The best following-up technique is to personalize each follow-up message and deliver some extra value they might be interested in. It can be achieved when you have deliberately followed the first step of getting to know your customer.

Close the deal

If you have built a good rapport with your buyer, closing doesn't require much effort, but if your prospect is still hesitant, you can try to solve their concerns and address their queries. You can give them offers they can avail themselves of by making a fast decision.

3 B2B sales strategies for a better sales pipeline

Measure your performance and improvise: You can improve if you can measure it—track all the relevant KPIs related to your sales process and devise the sales strategy. Find out what ways are not working and need to be tweaked.
Make sure your sales and marketing teams coordinate well: Both teams must be aligned and well-versed with the progress. Your marketing strategy generates leads, and the sales process closes the deal, so a mismatch in communication can waste time and money.
Leverage solution-based selling: Solution or pain-based selling refers to identifying your customers' pain points and designing the sales process around them. You have to address their concerns right from the first contact, showing that you care more about solving their problems than selling your product.

In addition, you can also deploy a sales rep application to help your sales team do their jobs the best way possible. Investing in a sales rep application equips you with robust salesforce solutions.

Conclusion

Planning your way with essential business functions is necessary to maximize your profits over time. Your entire business depends on how effectively you can sell your product. Therefore, you should craft your B2B sales strategy framework. In the end, remember that you are selling to people only; build relationships that last long with the b2b buyer. You must show people that you care beyond just selling your product to them. Apply the above knowledge, create a B2B sales strategy, and get on track with your sales process. You can also read How to calculate and improve the customer lifetime value of your B2B customers while we are on the subject of B2B sales and customer relationships.

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7 Customer Retention Benefits for Your Business

7 Benefits Of Customer Retention Your Business Is Missing Out On

A new customer is always worthy of your acquisition resources, but are you neglecting your current customers and not focusing on retaining them? Don't make this mistake. Retaining customers for a longer period yields more and better results over time. Customer retention is a lesser-known sales strategy but not an unprofitable one. If you are still not applying a retention strategy, you are missing out on many benefits of customer retention. The better your customer retention rate is, the more it shows that you can keep your customers over time.

Let's hop onto what are the benefits of customer retention:

Retention is more cost-effective than new acquisitions.

It is less expensive to retain customers than to acquire new customers. For acquiring new customer one has to start from the scratch for educating the new prospects about your product, launching various marketing campaigns for brand awareness, etc. It is good to acquire new customers, that's how business is created, but your current customer base can prove more profitable than getting new customers. Retention is more cost-effective than acquisition. Some ways for retaining your customers are personalizing each engagement with them or allowing them to give feedback without any restrictions.

Builds loyalty and referrals

Once you have loyal customers, they will be your most significant source for bringing a recurring source of income. You can put effort and money into marketing campaigns for lead generation, but the most compelling source is referrals. People engage and get influenced by their colleagues and peers much faster as compared to a business directly. Customers also build a sense of loyalty towards your business with regular engagement and retention strategies directed towards them. As a business it is important for you to reward your customers for being loyal to you. They tell their friends, family, business partners, and acquaintances about your company and may also give you a positive review. You will save on acquisition costs when you get new customers through referrals, as your expenses towards awareness reduces.

More profit by upselling and cross-selling

Getting a loyal customer base means winning the trust of your customers. It is easier for you to revise your prices when you have retained your customers. However, don't overuse this tactic to make extra profits. Customers will only pay more if they think you are delivering value to them. You can ask your customers if they'd like to upgrade to a better but relatively expensive version of your product or if they'd like to buy related products that can help them maximize results. The sale isn't over after the first purchase, and you can upsell and cross-sell regularly to loyal customers.

More room for improvement in your business

Long-term and engaging customers give you feedback, and you can track their business growth because of your product. Your loyal customer base defines your ideal customer profile. Hence tasking there ideal feedback or suggestion will help in making desired changes in the product to cater to the larger audience in similar type. There will be times when you can get negative feedback no matter how good your product is. Do not be upset with negative feedback; try to resolve your customers' problems most feasibly.

Get a competitive edge

Don't lose yourself in the crowd of businesses that focus on acquisition strategies and forget that they have current relationships too that need to be nurtured and grown. Plan a retention strategy ahead of time. Customers only stay with those businesses with whom they feel a personal connection. Additionally, retention shows that you know how to make someone keep coming back to your business and makes you stand out from your competitors. It shows that you value your customers. Your competitors might be trying to poach your customers but if you offer value to your customers, they are less likely to move and engage with your competitors. So make a retention strategy to show that your customers are essential to you.

Gain better insights into your customers

The businesses who reach success know their customers inside out. Making a retention strategy will require extensive research on your customers. The research is used for other purposes like customer service or product development. You need to know your customers' needs, emotions, challenges, purchasing power etc., for selling to and retaining customers. Detailed insights about your target audience help make better and more personalized products for them. Better products and sales will eventually lead to more profit and good business.

Reduced customer churn rate

The customer churn rate is the opposite of the customer retention rate. It refers to the rate customers stop buying from you over a given period. Now, losing customers is never good for any business and its reputation, and focusing on retention strategies will reduce customer churn rates to a great extent. For example, If a customer stops buying from you due to bad customer service they can leave a bad online review which may harm your reputation. Therefore, it's important to focus on retaining your customers and keeping them satisfied with your services. Free Man in White Dress Shirt Sitting on Chair Stock Photo

Free Man in White Dress Shirt Sitting on Chair Stock Photo

Conclusion

The above benefits are some things that no business should miss out on. Make sure you put efforts to retain your current customers retention strategy. A business's reputation is based on how well it can satisfy a consumer's needs and win their loyalty. Put extra effort into your current customer relationships; which might even prove more profitable. So do your best to retain your most valuable customers.

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B2B sales strategy framework for your business

B2B Sales Strategy Framework For Maximum Revenue: The Ultimate Guide

Your product or service is top-notch and can solve the problems of your target audience. But here comes the more significant challenge- creating a B2B sales strategy framework that will work. Your revenue is directly dependent on your sales, and so is your company's future. It is crucial to know how to plan your sales process to get the maximum results. Let's find out more about B2B sales strategy! You will find a method and 3 bonus tips to up level your sales process.

What are B2B sales?

B2B sales process is where one business sells goods or services to another company, and the end consumer of the good is a business rather than a person. It is essential to build a proper B2B sales strategy that your sales team will follow so that you can generate effective results without wasting resources and everyone knows what to do. Your marketing campaigns and full-proof plans can go to waste without a proper sales strategy.

An 8-step process to build a solid B2B sales strategy

Research your target audience

The first step in designing any marketing or sales campaign is getting to know the people you want to target. Research about what kind of businesses they have and the challenges they are trying to solve. Make customer personas based on your research in this process. These customer personas are artificial that reflect the characteristics of the people you want to sell to. Your sales reps can show better understanding and empathy when they know the person and their business problems. Some ways to research are client interviews, customer surveys, and engaging on social media. You can also study the existing customers by collecting data from your sales team. Dig deep to know the pain points of your target audience so that you can offer to solve them in the best possible way.

Analyze the market and competitors

This step involves analyzing market trends and your competitors. Research your target market and find out how you need to place your product there. Your competitors are the already available substitutes for your product in the market, and therefore, you need to know their strengths and weaknesses to pitch your product better. Look at who your competitors are selling to and how they do it. Find your competitors’ weak spots and overlooked areas in the market so that you can leverage them. You can check out their website, marketing campaigns, social media, reviews, etc. to analyze your competition.

Design a compelling USP

You will have to find a way to stand out from your competitors. Today's customers are well educated, especially when you're in the B2B market. They have internet resources to research the product and analyze all their options. People will buy from you only when they find you give them some extra value over your competitors. You need to know what pain points you are trying to solve, how you will solve them, why your product is relevant to your target audience, how you will provide customer support, etc. you will have this data if you did the first and second step properly. Then you need to place these points appealingly to show how you are different from the rest in the industry. Portray your message through social media, newsletters, blogs, and other content forms. Don’t focus on the features of your product, rather focus on how these features will benefit your customers. Convey what change your product can bring to your customer’s business.

Start building a customer relationship

Map out how you will make the first conversation with them and how to grab their attention. B2B buyers are very skeptical of sales reps, so if you lose credibility in the initial stages, then buyers won't waste their precious time on you as there are other sellers too. You can automate your marketing and sales processes to get important metrics like open email rates, video views, website activity, etc. You can reach out to people who seem interested in your product. After reaching out you can take them through the stages of your sales funnel. Based on which stage of the sales funnel they are at, you can send them the right sources and call to action.

Qualify leads

Not all prospects are relevant enough to put your time into. It would help if you filtered out hot and cold leads so that your efforts are directed in the most productive direction. Only 27% of the prospects are qualified leads. It is bad to put in the effort and realize later that they don't have the budget to buy from you. Therefore, it is better to match your prospects with the ideal buyer personas you have in mind. Lead management can be done through CRM software applications. These applications let you know what actions your leads have taken and also help you rank your leads. You can assign the hot leads to best-performing sales reps for converting them to clients and put the dead leads in the reengagement category. A CRM helps you to do much more than this. Read more here.

Pitch to the relevant leads

Tailor a personalized pitch for every relevant prospect. It is more productive to pitch nicely to a few highly pertinent prospects than to waste resources and generalize pitches to a broader audience. Make personalized pitches that address the specific pain points of your prospects. You can pitch through live video conferences, calls, in-person, and emails but make sure you talk more about the customer and the value he is getting instead of speaking mundane details about your company and the product. Customers care less about the features of the products and care more about what benefit they are getting from them.

Follow-up

The key is in the follow-up. But following up with your B2B buyers is also a dilemma for the sales reps as B2B buyers are business people who remain busy and may get annoyed with excessive follow-up calls or messages. The best following-up technique is to personalize each follow-up message and deliver some extra value that they might be interested in. It can be achieved when you have followed the first step of getting to know your customer deliberately.

Close the deal

If you have built a good rapport with your buyer, closing doesn't require much effort, but if your prospect is still hesitant, you can try to solve their concerns and address their queries. You can give them offers that they can avail themselves of by making a fast decision.

Post Sales Support

Once you close the deal, provide with a good after sales service, customer support. Companies use it to assess their performance and use after sales services to show customer commitment ensuring customer satisfaction.

3 B2B sales strategies for a better sales pipeline

Measure your performance and improvise: You can improve something if you can measure it. Track, all the relevant KPIs related to your sales process and improvise on the sales strategy. Find out what ways are not working and need to be tweaked.
Make sure your sales and marketing teams are coordinating well: Both teams must be aligned and well-versed with the progress. Your marketing strategy generates leads, and the sales process closes the deal, so a mismatch in communication can waste time and money.
Leverage solution-based selling: Solution or pain-based selling refers to identifying your customers' pain points and designing the sales process around them. You have to address their concerns right from the first contact with them, and this shows that you care more about solving their problems than selling your product.

In addition, you can also deploy a sales rep application to help your sales team do their jobs the best way possible. Investing in a sales rep application equips you with robust salesforce solutions.

Conclusion

Planning your way with essential business functions is necessary to maximize your profits over time. Your entire business depends on how effectively you can sell your product. Therefore, you should craft your B2B sales strategy framework. In the end, remember that you are selling to people only; build relationships that last long with the B2B buyer. You need to show people that you care beyond just selling your product to them. Apply the above knowledge, create a B2B sales strategy, and get right on track with your sales process. You can also read How to calculate and improve the customer lifetime value of your B2B customers while we are on the subject of B2B sales and customer relationships.

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Sales Rep Tracking: How & Why it is important?

What is Sales Rep Tracking?

Sales tracking is the procedure of gathering and analyzing essential sales metrics. It provides you with detailed insight into each segment of the sales process. Later it helps you comprehend the relation between these insights and your sales goals. Plus, the insights are essential to convert more prospects into customers. As per Iron Paper, 65% of customers get lost in the sales pipeline because of indifference, not because of mistakes. Also, it helps in building a sustainable strategy to keep a tab on critical sales KPIs. Besides, tracking sales today helps you in resource management, sales forecasting, and client & staff performance management. Free Man Using Silver Laptop Beside Another Man Stock Photo

Free Man Using Silver Laptop Beside Another Man Stock Photo

Why do we need Sales Rep Tracking?

Success in sales is impossible without tracking numbers. It's similar to playing golf while blindfolded. The salesperson must track sales metrics to identify top-selling products, high-value customers, no sale customers, and identify new opportunities. If you haven't started sales rep tracking, you are missing big opportunities. Here are the ways sales rep tracking could do wonder for your sales department:

Offers Real-Time Insights

Data is the new oil. Having access to customers' behavior data helps you identify the patterns and predict their needs & decisions. For instance, maybe your customer base for a product has decreased. It means you are no longer meeting your business goals and your products are losing their presence in the market. Such real-time insights help you find the solution. As a result, you build and improve your relationships with customers & clients.

Identify problems at an early stage to keep customers happy.

The data extracted in sales rep tracking helps you recognize and tackle problems in the early stage. A customer wishes for all-time support not only when a problem arises. Thence, you must assign a customer success manager (CSM) to each customer. The CSM reviews and check-in their data periodically. The customer gets maximum satisfaction if their issues are solved proactively. Thus the customer churn rate also decreases.

Enhance resource collection

Analyzed resource allocation is vital for planning, scheduling, and assigning available resources. This allocation should be economical regarding business performance, time, and workers' availability. Proper Customer Management comes from smart planning of when and which resources to use to derive the information of when and where the right tracking software is required.

Make Tailored Product offerings.

All the trending e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart, and eBay have by heart the art of making irresistible and personalized offers for customers. The sales rep tracking software help in providing the best fit solution or product for each consumer. They keep track of every step you make on their website. This tracking helps in forecasting the future purchases of individuals. Moreover, you get the opportunity to infuse the products customers feed, which they are likely to buy. Free Three People Sitting Beside Table Stock Photo

Free Three People Sitting Beside Table Stock Photo

How to set up a sales rep tracking process?

Sales rep tracking metrics enable you to evaluate the performance of your sales progression and business growth. Some essential metrics comprise sales KPIs, activity sales metrics, pipeline metrics, outreach metrics, and sales productivity metrics. You may be already tracking these sales metrics. But organizing these efforts into a sales tracking system is what is going to yield results. Read how to set up a sales rep tracking system:

Select the right data to track

Firstly, you need to decide the data you wish to track. Usually, businesses collect data from chunks of sources to understand what suits best to the company in a larger picture. The sources comprise help desk software, email marketing, automation platforms, and social media platforms. When you track the right data, you can pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses. Then you can strengthen and maximize sales. On the other side, you can also focus on working on your weakness. Besides improving your ROI, it also earns you a loyal customer base. It provides a better market presence and qualified leads.

Share the Plan

The next step includes sharing the collected data within your business. These insights can benefit the customer success teams, sales, marketing, and developers. It helps in ideating engaging campaigns and product updates that compliment your sales strategy. Sharing these critical data among the company aligns each team' KPIs with the company's goals.

Utilize the data to make improvements for customers

Collecting data offers valuable, actionable insights. For instance, suppose your NPS score is dropping and the customer churning rate increases. You can ask the customers for feedback, and the input will unfold the scope of improvement in your products and services. There could be multiple reasons, such as missing core features or reactive customer support. The feedback and insights from customers motivate you to improve the product, customer support, marketing, or sales strategies.

Conclusion

Now you have a fair understanding of sales tracking. We all know how dynamic is the market and customer's needs. But building your own sales rep tracking system via the process and tools, you can keep a tab of your sales process. But you might be unable to balance the thirst for growth and the lack of bandwidth to handle the volume of new leads. So, let's get in touch and see how Indigo Olive Software can help you solve such issues in sales rep tracking.

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Radius360x Mobile Application: Order Management On The Go

Radius360x Comes To Your Pocket With An All-New Mobile App

We have been delivering value to our customers with desktop applications but now Radius360x has come to your pocket with an all-new mobile app. Indigo Olive’s flagship product Radius360x mobile application is cross-platform across Apple, Android, and Windows. We specialize in helping our customers streamline their businesses’ sales and delivery processes. We have built tools that help distributors or wholesalers with ordering, reporting, and digital tracking.

Greater Productivity With The Mobile App

Want to place and modify orders on the go even when offline? We are here for your rescue. You can manage orders even without the internet on our all-new mobile app. The biggest advantage of the Radius360x mobile application would be the ease of using it. You don’t have to worry about having a monitor to manage your business functions. You can do it from anywhere, anytime with our mobile app. Handling your business through your mobile gives greater productivity, more data accessibility, and better connectivity. Let’s look at what we offer.

What Does The Radius360x Mobile Application Offer?

Indigo Olive aims to automate sales and delivery processes for Small and Medium scale businesses and provide a hassle-free solution for managing your team on the field. [video mp4="https://indigoolive.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Radius360x_-Sales-Automation-_-Made-for-Distributors-_-Mobile-App-_-Field-Sales-App-_-Track-Sales-1.mp4" poster="https://indigoolive.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/MicrosoftTeams-image-1.jpg"][/video] We offer the following products to streamline your sales functions.

1. Streamline Your Sales Process With Our Sales Rep Application

A sales rep application that aids your field sales rep to deliver the best results. Your sales reps can place orders and view real time sales and inventory updates on the application. You can also customize catalogs for your customers giving each customer a satisfactory experience. Schedule calls and visits seamlessly through the application and also view customer history and order guides. Our application can be seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks and it has in-built integrated cloud connectivity.

2. Manage Your Fleet On Ground With Our Route Planner App

This app allows you to optimize deliveries routes for your fleet and get the most out of deliveries without wasting resources. It is a multi stop route planner that finds the most cost-effective route for multiple deliveries. Additionally, you can go paperless with your delivery management. Manage invoices, collect payments and print them through Bluetooth printers and handle everything digitally. Automate truck loading and pick-up easily and also get live updates of deliveries. This application can be integrated with Fintech and VIP.

3. Make Better Decisions With Our Insight Analysis Dashboard: BI Reporting Tool

We all know the significance of the increasing role of technology in business reporting. It helps decision-makers to save time and make strategic decisions with greater efficiency. Our BI tool helps with sales projections and forecasts with the help of AI. You can generate reports related to employee efficiency, customer, trending products, market trends, and even customized reports. It turns all your quantitative data into understandable reports for better analysis. Our application also contains pre ready report templates for your ease.

4. Sample Management

Sample products are sent for events, tasting, product launches, etc. But managing the process might become a highly unorganized and wasteful procedure without a proper system in place. Through our application, field sales reps can place sample product orders and request for admin approval of the same. Admins can create a periodic budget for sales reps and coordinate on sampling campaigns effectively. Sales reps can modify orders on the go and also set rebates and discounts on samples.

Schedule A Demo

We are a customer-driven company and our everyday effort goes into enhancing the value that our customers receive from our product. We understand that one solution doesn’t fit all therefore we offer our customers personalized app solutions. We don’t just hold your hands at the onboarding but assist you in your daily business needs. We help you focus on other areas that need your attention by automating your entire sales process. Book a demo with us to know more about how Radiux360x can help you upscale your business!

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UI/ UX Design For SaaS: Importance And Benefits

UI/ UX design is not meant for imagery or beautifying the project. It is not meant for large companies only. Each SaaS project must have a good quality UI/ UX so that users get a quality customer experience while interacting with the software. UI/UX holds immense importance in SaaS. It determines the grade of customer experience and value that your users are getting by using your product. It also dictates your customer retention rate because no customer in today’s age will stick to a product with bad UI/ UX.

Here are 5 benefits of a good UI/ UX design for SaaS:

1. User Friendly Navigation

UI/ UX design for SaaS helps customers to easily find the links to all important information. An application or a site that is not designed in a user friendly way makes it difficult to navigate through necessary info. A developer can execute the code for your software but a UI/ UX designer makes sure that the software’s interface is as user friendly as it can get. Your product should be adaptable to a variety of screen sizes as users interact with the application through different devices.

2. Enhanced Customer Support

By skillfully integrating a 24/7 chatbot or giving live customer support pop up, SaaS providers can give better customer support. Easily available and quality customer support makes the users stick with your product. Other UI/ UX enhancements that help customers are in app notifications to fill the knowledge gap, brief tutorials about the project, FAQs, etc. All these customer support tools help companies to retain customers.

3. Helps In Lead Generation

Signup forms are an essential element to get quality leads for a business. A good UI/ UX design ensures that your Call-to-action is placed in a manner that makes it most convenient for your customers to sign up. Designing your signup form smartly will help you in collecting relevant customer information. Good design makes the color of your button easily differentiable from your background. A good CTA call to action makes for better user experience.

4. Improves User Retention

Customers look for quality and they are most likely to stick with a product only if it provides a smooth user experience. They will drop a product if it is difficult to use. It's essential to showcase the product's value to customers and retain them because SaaS service’s success depends on its consumption.

5. Reduce bounce rate

An effective UI/UX design for SaaS will incorporate information on the website in such a way that the users find what they are looking at in the right place and in the right order. Bounce rate is a metric that measures the overall performance of the website in terms of engagement. For example, if the information architecture of the website is not well organized then it is highly unlikely for the user to navigate the website for more than a few seconds. This issue can be fixed with a well planned UI/UX design.

Conclusion

A successful UX solution gives users a frictionless onboarding experience. UI/ UX design makes the application easy to use for the customer and also gives space for customer support. These things will help you to retain your customers. There remain some myths about UI/ UX design for SaaS that restrict SaaS companies from hiring a UI/ UX designer despite all the benefits. Some people think UI/ UX designing is expensive and they should save on it. What they fail to consider is- getting a quality UI/ UX design only increases the usability of their product. Other SaaS sellers with small projects think small projects don’t need UI/ UX. This is not right because user experience matters a lot regardless of the size of the project. Don’t let myths stop you from investing in UI/ UX design for your SaaS project. While you are on the topic of improving your SaaS project, have a look at 5 must haves for saas customer support.

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Customer Lifetime Value: How and Why

How to Calculate and Improve the Lifetime Value of your B2B Customers

Customer Lifetime Value or CLV is a measurement of how valuable a customer is throughout the whole customer-seller relationship. It is also calculated as the net profit gained from an entire customer relationship. This stat gives managers a measure of what the customers are worth. B2B marketers calculate CLV as it puts a quantitative metric on customer relationships.

Why is it important to track CLV?

CLV is an important metric to track because retaining customers costs less than acquiring new ones. In addition, it help business leaders to develop strategies for acquiring new customers while maintaining profit margins. Regardless, of the definition and the formula for CLV, every manager should aim to improve it. Increased CLV = Profit for the company. Calculating CLV is important in B2B as it tells managers the likely sales a customer would make over their lifetime. Thus, it can be calculated as a future value as well as historical value.

Historical CLV and Predictive CLV

CLV puts a number on the worth of customers of a company. Let's look at how CLV is calculated. For each customer, the historical CLV simply sums up the gross profit from all of their previous purchases. It indicates how much profit the company has made from a customer’s account till now. The predictive CLV will be the predicted gross profit on a customer’s account. The Customer Value Prediction should show future revenue (net present value) minus costs related with a customer.

How to improve Customer Lifetime Value?

The core strategy to improve CLV is to retain customers as long as possible. Managers should aim to minimize customer churn as much as possible. The question now arises is how to do this? Here are some strategies that can help you in retaining your customers for long:

Improve customer support:

Provide 24/7 customer support and live chat support to your customers. Track support response times and keep putting efforts to improve them. Train and update your employees to resolve the issues of your customers. Track recurring issues and fix them.

Make onboarding as easy as possible:

Make your onboarding process easy and engaging. Know the pain points of your customer and explain to them how they can use your product to solve those pain points. Provide with the support material through videos, live calls, tutorials, guides, etc. Follow up after the onboarding process to see how everything is going.

Keep delivering value to existing customers:

Keep feeding your customers with valuable content about the industry and the product. You can do this through blogs, emails, newsletters, or calls. Educate your customers and give them tips to use the product in the most productive way.

Build personal ties:

No customer wants a generic treatment. Customers’ expectations have increased and they want a personalized experience if they are buying from you. Stay connected with your customers throughout their customer relationship. Monitor their progress and assist them throughout. Get to know the people who are using your product as well as make them know you as more than a seller.

Upsell and cross-sell:

You have delivered the main product, now you can sell the expensive version of the service that has more value to the same customer. This is called upselling. It increases the scope of the exciting service they’ve bought. You can offer bundled products, temporary upgrades, and special trial pricing. You can cross-sell complimentary services that can enhance the productivity of the existing product.

Conclusion

CLV is an important KPI that can indicate the amount of profits a company generates from its customers. Managers must aim to increase the customer retention rate. The more you value your customers, the more they will keep buying from you. Retaining existing customers and upselling to them generates more revenue with fewer costs. Therefore, it is more cost-efficient than acquiring new customers. While you are working to improve your CLV, have a look at B2B marketing strategies that you don't want to ignore.

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BI Reporting: The future of Data

The future of Data

In today’s world, competition is high and almost every business is using technology to get better results. The technology in BI allows managers to make informed decisions to get accurate results. Data plays a huge role in business growth as it allows decision-makers to draw real-time insights.

Data analytics will grow in the future

Companies are also using big data to fast-track growth. They can create whole customer personas just with the use of big data. This allows them to sell more by targeting customer personas. There is no doubt about the growth of data analytics in the future. Keep on reading to know significant things about the future of data analytics.

Some things that you need to know about the future of data:

ML and AI will continue to grow:

These technologies are already being used for customizing customer experiences. Some experts say that ML and AI will take on many roles related to customer service in the future. They play a huge role in BI applications by simplifying complex data so that managers can focus on important tasks.

BI will cure the lack of data specialists:

As the field of data analytics continues to grow, there is a lack of data analysts in the industry. To tackle this, companies can start training potential data specialists today or can also use BI. This is because BI allows users to derive understandable business reports without knowing the techniques that go behind them.

Big data will play a huge role in Business:

Big data allows businesses to build customer personas and customize services for them. This will allow companies to build services & products that solve the pain points of their customer personas and improvise their services.

Managing data is becoming challenging:

It is essential to make sure that the data that is going in for analysis is accurate as the future of the company depends on it. Although, it is becoming difficult to ensure the validity of the data. Due to security & privacy issues, it is difficult to manage huge customer data. Moreover, the customer of today is becoming more careful about the privacy of their data. Business leaders have realized the importance of making data-driven decisions. Also, data-backed plans are more likely to give results rather than intuitive plans. We at Radius360x provide BI software that allows businesses to get valuable insights from the huge amount of data they have. Trust on BI is enabling businesses to gain useful reports from complex data. Raw data is of no use because managers don’t have time to organize it. Plus it cannot be used for decision-making. Our product is cost-effective, easy to use, and quick to install. Our insight dashboard has data according to various KPIs. Radius360x’s BI tool gives you an Insight dashboard which makes data analysis easier through graphical and picture representations. Book a demo with us to know more about how we can help you.

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Business Intelligence: How & Why

Business Intelligence: Meaning and Importance

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is called BI in short. It refers to an AI-based software. BI is used to generate user-friendly business reports. Managers use these simplified reports to make informed decisions. Companies have large amounts of data stored with them. Organizing and then analyzing that data can be too hectic for employees. More problems arise when it is a large scale company. Analyzing complex data manually is a time-consuming and draining task. In addition, it also includes manual errors and biases. This is where BI comes in. The software helps decision-makers to make sense of complex data.

How does it work?

Companies collect data from internal & external systems which is then processed and organized in a simpler form. Thereby, helping in strategic planning. For example, companies that want to make sales predictions using BI. They collect data like current production, sales history, competitor research, customer behavior, market trends, etc. Then this data is organized in a systematic form. Organizing means removing duplicates, adding & modifying the data uniformly. BI tools then derive business reports from the information. These are ready-to-read reports that can help managers make informed business decisions. It also helps in combining analytics, data mining, data visualization, and data tools and infrastructure. It gives a 360-degree view of an company’s data. Let us now see why Business Intelligence matters.

BI matters because:

It helps the managers in making data-driven decisions that are more accurate.
Using it, leaders gain access to useful data and act on it right away. This lets them gain an edge over other businesses.
Business analysts can use BI to know market trends. Then, they use market trends to increase sales and revenue.
BI helps to improve customer satisfaction. It scans customer behavior and suggests to them what they like.
It can also help in tracking performance and finding issues in business operations.
BI analyzes competitors’ data and compares it to your performance. This helps to gain an edge over competitors.

The decision-making of your company should depend on business reports backed by data and not guess work. Managers use BI to drive change and cut-out any shortcomings. It also comes in handy while trying to quickly adapt to market trends or supply changes. Read 3 benefits of BI tools for your business here. -By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

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How to build a content strategy for businesses

Before learning how to create a content marketing strategy for a B2B business, let’s see why content marketing for businesses is important. Below listed are some advantages of content marketing. These are the reasons you should invest in building a content strategy for your business.:

It increases brand awareness.
It shows you as a thought leader in your industry.
Content makes your audience trust you for solving their pain points.
It gives knowledge to the reader.
It tells the reader about your product.

These benefits won’t come to you by posting once a month on your social media or creating one paid ad. Content marketing efforts need to be consistent and well-planned to yield results. And for that having a well-planned content strategy is important.

A content strategy will guide you on:

Who are you creating content for?
Which content assets to create?
Where and when to publish them?
How to promote them?
What are the goals you are trying to achieve through the content?

A B2B content strategy is different from a B2C content strategy. B2B buyers make more conscious decisions. You can’t sway with flashy advertisements like B2C buyers. B2B buying decisions are made after thorough research. They make decisions keeping in mind the organization's growth rather than personal emotions. You need to make your content detailed, structured, targeted, and concise to impress B2B buyers.

How to create a B2B content strategy:

1. Start by having deep knowledge about your target audience: The most important element of a content strategy for businesses is the target audience. Your target audience is the group of people who buy from you or bring benefits to your business in some way. It consists of different buyer personas. Identify them, their needs, their pain points, their preferences, etc. Creating a targeted content strategy that addresses the pain points of your audience is the most successful way of yielding positive results. 2. Decide on your core content assets and platforms: Many types of content formats can be used for your content marketing plan. These can be blogs, e-books, newsletters, videos, images, podcasts, interviews, Q&A sessions, social media posts, case studies, etc. Decide on the core formats that you want to create and the platforms that you are going to use. These platforms may depend on where your target audience is present. 3. Analyze your competitor’s marketing strategy: Your target is the same as your competitor. Analyze what strategies are working for them and what can be done better. Look into what kinds of content they are posting and what’s something they have not leveraged till now. For example, your competitor might be using blogs, videos, and social media. You can start a podcast for your target audience besides doing all those things. 4. Include guest-posting and features in your plan: Featuring in the famous B2B newsletter can be a way of increasing your reach. Blogs, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels that have already gained authority in your niche can help you gain your target audience’s trust. 5. Optimize your content for SEO: Building authority in a niche means that if someone is looking for answers related to your industry then they would refer to your content. This can be increased by making your content search engine friendly. You can optimize your content for search engines by inserting keywords and key phrases. Create meta description, headings, image alt text, title tags, etc. The priority should be posting quality content that solves the issue of the reader. 6. Make content for each part of the buyer's journey: Identify which content fits in which stage of the buyer’s journey. Make content for the awareness stage, then lead the buyer towards content for the next stage of consideration. 7. Measure your success through metrics: The qualitative aspects like trust, authority, and brand awareness can’t be measured through metrics. But you can measure other quantitative aspects like leads, organic traffic, post views, blog views, conversion rates, search engine ranking, etc. A proper content marketing strategy when executed diligently will lead to improvement in these metrics. Another content strategy for businesses can be promoting your content on different platforms or prioritizing link building and collaborations. Producing content is essentially important in today’s age. It is so because the options in the market are immense and B2B buyers like to do thorough research before investing their company’s money in a certain product. Without enough content on your socials and website, you’ll lag behind your competitors who are using content marketing to their advantage. Make a calendar that shows which content format is going on which platform, on what day and time. Follow that calendar and measure the success of your content strategy monthly, quarterly and yearly. Improve upon things that are not working for you and do more of things that are working. All the best on your content marketing journey. For a bonus here are some B2B marketing strategies that you don’t want to ignore.

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How to increase employee retention rate at your company

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

What is the employee retention rate?

Employee retention rate is an organization's ability to retain its employees. Increasing employee retention rate reduces employee turnover rate. If a business’s employee turnover rate is high then it results in resource wastage for the company. A high retention rate builds a team that takes the load of growing the company on their shoulders.

Retaining top performers is important if you want your company to grow.

Here are some tips that you can use to increase your employee retention rate.

1. Focus on your employees' career development

Support your employees in their journey of career development. Keep challenging them with projects, train them, support them in their educational endeavors, etc. Most employees want to keep growing in their respective career field.

2. Offer benefits and perks

Perks apart from the compensation may be more valuable than you think. Benefits like health insurance, corporate discounts, coffee at the workplace, mental well-being counseling, etc. can help increase your retention rate.

3. Give space for work-life balance

Don’t reach out to your employees during non-working hours. Encourage your employees to take proper rest periods. Employees will also be more productive when they are well-rested.

4. Provide flexible working conditions

Post pandemic, many employees have become more comfortable with working from home and flexible work hours. You are more likely to retain employees when you give flexible working conditions to them.

5. Have recognition systems at the workplace

Recognition systems make your employees feel seen and appreciated. They are a way of telling your employees that their contribution is valued. For example, colleagues can nominate each other for employee of the month.

6. Foster respect and inclusivity

All employees want to be respected and included. They would stay for longer in a place where they are respected rather than staying in a disrespectful environment no matter how good the company is. Click here to find out how to make your workplace more inclusive.

7. Connect with your team

This can help create a bond between the employer and employees. You can connect with your team by hosting celebrations outside of work. Converse with your employees to know them on an individual level. Building real connections pays off in the long term. Companies try so hard to hire good candidates but that is of no use if they are not able to retain them. Increasing your employee retention rate helps bring ROI in the long term. It saves resources for the company. Training new employees often due to high turnover rate results in wastage of time and money.

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Sales Automation vs. Marketing Automation2

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation refers to using software that automates repetitive and manual tasks. This helps the sales team to focus on generating and closing more leads. Sales automation tools can help you automate follow-ups, schedule payment reminders and invoices for your customers, nurture your sales pipeline, etc. Benefits of sales automation

Automating follow-ups: Sales automation tools can help you differentiate hot leads and cold leads so that your sales team can automate follow ups with them.
Automating outbound emails: Your sales team won’t be under the burden of sending outbound emails manually if you are using a sales automation system.
Integrating sales call: Calls with potential or current customers can be recorded and transcribed so that they can be analyzed and reflected upon later.
Schedule demo: After leads are showing interest, the sales team can create personalized content for them. The sales team can give demo of the product and see how they engage with it.
Close the deal: You can contact the relevant people with offers that are best suited for them. Sales automation process helps you to know and analyze your prospects in a better way. This helps to close the deal in an efficient and speedy manner.
Reducing manual efforts and cost: Main purpose of sales automation is to reduce the manual efforts of employees and the cost of lead generation.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation refers to automating the marketing tasks and processes using software and web-based services. In marketing automation, tedious and repetitive manual tasks are performed by technology. This boosts campaign performance and increases campaign speed. Marketing automation includes automating email marketing campaigns, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, etc. Benefits of marketing automation:

Create a marketing client database: It helps you to build a database of your target audience. This helps when you want to create touchpoints with your potential customers.
Automate routine marketing tasks: This saves a lot of time for the organization. For example, tasks like posting content on social media or engaging with users based on their level of activity.
Nurture and track leads: Marketing automation tools help you to track leads and nurture them in a way that the conversion rate increases.
SEO and marketing automation: Integrating SEO with your marketing campaigns can help you generate inbound leads organically. SEO gives a boost to your online presence and increases searchability for your business.
Integration with CRM tools: CRM stands for customer relationship management. Marketing automation integrated with CRM tools can help you get valuable insights about the customers. This way you can build relevant campaigns that get you better results.
Segment audiences: Once you have got hold of your target audience, you can categorize them on the basis of their preferences, interests, engagement, on-site activities, etc. This helps to engage with them in a more organized and targeted way.

The difference between Sales and Marketing Automation

Sales Automation vs Marketing Automation

Processes: Streamlining the sales pipeline by facilitating internal workflows VS Managing marketing touchpoints and making sure that each prospect is receiving information about the product
Responsibility: To execute the ultimate conversion steps like making calls with prospects VS Nurture leads in such a way that increases the conversion rate.
Purpose: Close Sales deals VS Create leads for Sales
Implementation Stage: Can be skipped if the business is new VS Can be applied to every stage of the business
Data: Statistics about prospects' activities in the sales funnel vs Data and performing metrics related to marketing campaigns.

Integrating both for a more powerful business

If your business is new then starting with marketing automation will give you the necessary boost to nurture leads but after a while, integrating sales and marketing automation would prove to be the most productive. Automated sales follow-up offers targeted, personalized communication for sales teams following up on successful marketing campaigns that were done through marketing automation. A powerful force for revenue creation is created by using these two tools together, in the right way. While combining sales and marketing automation, you can also opt for a whole automated CRM system. An automated CRM system consists of marketing, sales, and service automation to boost the journey through a sales funnel for customers and puts lead generation and deal closing on autopilot.

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Debunking 4 SaaS Myths

By Dipali Nishad for Indigo Olive Software What is SaaS? Software as a Service (SaaS) refers to software licensing and delivery models. Hubspot, Email, Calendaring and Shopify are a few examples of SaaS. It allows users to access programs via the internet. Hence no need of installing complex software and maintaining hardware. SaaS customers pay a subscription fee to access the application. The organizations are deploying SaaS applications to enhance IT service delivery efficiency and encourage the scalability of business solutions. Despite its growing popularity, several large enterprises are still hesitant to replace their legacy software with a SaaS solution. The biggest reason is the existence of myths which need to be debunked. Some of them are listed below: Myth 1: SaaS applications aren’t secure Although few technical budding issues are informed by the leading providers, the number of such instances are too low. SaaS in cloud services is highly secured. The precautionary measures for the escalated technology growth are as high as the industrial standards. High security ensures that users don’t face risk of data loss, misuse or privacy violation. Myth 2: Only Small business can benefit from SaaS The reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Software as a Subscription benefits SMBs greatly; business adoption is also quite strong for the same reason. In reality, enterprise customers account for the majority of SaaS income. The primary drivers of SaaS adoption among all the users are minimum effort, convenience of use, low set-up and maintenance costs. Many users and industry professionals agree that SaaS eliminates the day-to-day inconvenient nature of traditional software. “I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster,” the late Steve Jobs stated. Myth 3: SaaS Applications are unreliable With the speedy upgradation and innovations in technology, do you still feel SaaS is less than on-premise solutions? You are mistaken! SaaS is actually proven to be more reliable than on-premise solutions. The SaaS vendors are offering 99.5% uptime for the services they provide. Crashing of an on-premise software, need of update or virus contract will bring a downtime. The once in a while occurring service interruptions in large cloud providers such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com are widely known. Furthermore, organizational outages cost both the valuable time and huge expense. A lot of IT resources are consumed in order to get the system backups and working. In addition, the cloud infrastructure is backed with 24*7 authentic customer support and load-balancing features. Myth 4: SaaS does not provide access to all user data In SaaS contracts, it is clearly mentioned that a customer either owns or has the right to all user data. Through an admin dashboard SaaS vendors give access to rich data and analytics. In case, organizations and customers terminate an agreement, they can effortlessly export and use all user data as per their requirement. The cloud stored SaaS solutions give flexible reporting and web service integration which makes it accessible through any place with a browser and internet connection. Organizations need to understand the facts behind baseless myths of SaaS. Adopting SaaS results in higher and sustainable revenues. It helps companies to make the most out of a limited IT budget by giving access to cutting -edge technology and professional assistance.

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5 Must haves for SaaS Customer Support

By Dipali Nishad for Indigo Olive Software What is SaaS customer support? Saas Customer support refers to the support offered by SaaS companies to the customers. It consists of responding to queries and troubleshooting problems via mediums such as FAQs, chatbot, email, communities, telephonic and virtual support. Webinars, knowledge-based documentation, and other educational resources are provided to inform the customers about the updates and advancements in the products "Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company! It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers, there is no company!" - Connie Elder, Founder & CEO, PEAK 10 SKIN With modern technology, A-1 Customer Support System is easy to build. However, businesses usually forget to focus on the basic and the most essential features of customer support. To make sure you don’t miss out on such features, we have listed the 5 must-haves of SaaS Customer Support.

Easily discoverable Support Widgets Imagine you are in a Departmental Store. Everything is just dumped on the shelf. You won’t be able to find what you were looking for and your frustration will shoot up. Similarly, in an app or a website, if a customer is facing some issue, he/she looks for a support widget. If the customer is not able to find your hidden support widget, his/her frustration will also shoot up. It can also result in higher customer churn. A complex website/application forces the customer to do a full website audit. It delays the process of the customer reaching the desired page or option they were looking for. Bad customer experience can cause a decline in profit. So, for actionable customer feedback, make sure the support widget is easy to find.
Provide comprehensive FAQs for Self Service Support In the modern world, customers wish for the same level of support they had when they first self-discovered the product- with self-service support like FAQs, knowledge base, in-app tutorials, etc. Self-service support is a kind of computerized support, where customers can tackle specific issues on their own. As per the ZenDesk report, 67% of users prefer self-service support and 91% of survey respondents say they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs. Therefore, SaaS businesses should include an excellent FAQs page by all means. The FAQ page should be easily available, comprehendible, and informative. Putting time and assets into setting up a FAQ page won't just reduce the pressure of Customer Support but will also save your customers’ time.
Make the best use of Live Chat If self-service doesn’t work, confused customers always want to speak to a real person. They look for on-demand support which gives real-time solutions 24*7. As per Kayako's research, 41%, 32%, 23% and 3% of the audience preferred customer support via live chat, phone calls, email, and social media, respectively. This statement suggests a larger number of customers have high expectations from live chats. Moreover, it’s cost-efficient. Since a smaller number of chat agents are required, it increases efficiency. Nowadays, links, attachments, and images can be shared in the live chat box which eases the solution procedure. Eventually, it leads to an improved customer experience.
Fix the root cause of support requests Support data is the biggest asset when it comes to customer support service. After analyzing the data, three kinds of requests will be observed i.e., Bugs, Missing features, and Confusing/ hidden features. Doesn’t matter if it’s brand new or the newest software, it can’t be bug-free. With each update, a new bug is found. The only solution is- Find it before the customer does and eliminate it. Technology is upgrading every single day. To find missing features in your software/application, look at what your customers are searching for. If a feature is repeatedly popping up in support requests you need to focus on fixing the feature’s issues immediately. For the features not developed yet, give alternatives. Lastly, address the hidden/confusing features requests with your tech team.
Have the right Customer Service and Customer Support Agents Customer Support and Customer Service are important to build long and trusted relations with customers. However, there is a thin line between them. Customer service agents deal with simple issues and offer proactive responses. The agents don’t require a deep technical knowledge of the product or service. They only need to be empathetic, patient and pay attention to customers and make them feel heard. Whereas customer support agents continuously help the customers. They are aware of A to Z of the product or service. They deal with specific technical issues. It is important to have proficient customer support agents, fully equipped with all technical knowledge to resolve all issues in the shortest time span.

Conclusion In the information age, the Customer is still the king. And their feedback is essential to improve products or services, retain customers and generate testimonials for your prospects. With the above actionable must-haves, you can reduce the customer churn rate and strengthen your customer support system.

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Top 5 SaaS trends to keep an eye on

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

According to Statista, the SaaS industry will grow to acquire a market share of $157 billion by the end of 2021. This industry has seen rapid growth and will continue to grow even more in the coming years.

SaaS applications don't need heavy hardware management. Their easy to install and use system is what makes SaaS products highly popular. It is known that 99% of businesses will be using one or more SaaS applications by the end of 2021.

SaaS products are changing how businesses work. They are leaving behind legacy systems and moving to more advanced solutions. SaaS applications have an edge as they provide upgraded, easy to access and customized features depending upon the software and service provider. They can be easily integrated with other applications as well leading to greater productivity.

Why keep up with SaaS trends?

SaaS adoption is on the rise. Companies are leaving behind legacy systems and integrating advanced SaaS products to automate, fasten and streamline their business activities. Keeping up with the SaaS trends can help you catch up with what’s going on in the industry. Advancing your SaaS products with the trends can help you deliver better services to your customers.

Top 5 SaaS trends to follow in 2021

AI for business needs and security: As SaaS products are software-based they need a high level of security. AI can be used for threat detection before any malware tries to enter the software. Another advantage of AI is automation. Companies have started adopting automated software to increase their productivity. Automated CRM software in SaaS is a great example of this.
Blockchain: Blockchain is popularly known as the technology behind bitcoin, but it is much more than that. Blockchain technology allows users to maintain a decentralized database that cannot be tampered with. This can help businesses gain the trust of their customers. Blockchain is already in use in the SaaS industry. It can streamline tasks like billing, payments, validation, authentication by eliminating the need for third-party intervention.
Vertical SaaS: The vertical SaaS model continues to trend in 2021. Unlike horizontal SaaS which focuses on as many fields as possible, vertical SaaS focuses on solving specific needs of a single industry. The benefit of vertical SaaS is that companies can pose themselves as experts in particular niches. This results in successful marketing campaigns and more opportunities to upsell. Some examples of successful vertical SaaS are Veeva, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.
Growth of low-code platforms: The growth of low-code platforms will be on the rise in the future. Most productivity tools will be low-code. Kissflow, a workflow management instrument, and Mendix, an app development software are great examples of low-code SaaS platforms. Low-code allows developers to build easy drag and drop interfaces that are very useful to use and integrate.
Mobile experience first: The number of mobile users is increasing day by day. SaaS businesses must keep in mind to develop mobile-friendly products. Work with competent mobile-app developers to ensure that your customers get the best interface while using your product. Trello, Skype, and MatterMost are great examples of companies that prioritized the mobile experience first and gained from it.

Now you know which Saas trends would see more growth in 2021. 78% of small businesses have already invested in a SaaS solution to better their business activities. The industry is only going to rise in the coming few years. Despite the size of organizations, they are embracing the SaaS model and moving towards modern solutions.

SaaS innovations have made it possible for enterprises to provide better services to the end-users. And as businesses grow the adoption of SaaS is only going to increase.

Get a demo with us today!

We at Radius360x work endlessly towards creating better solutions for businesses out there. Our Sales force automation, BI applications and other solutions help organizations to increase productivity and work in an efficient manner. Get a demo with us and see what works best for you.

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Benefits of Live Inventory that your business might be overlooking

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

What is real-time inventory?

Real-time inventory management is the process of updating inventory changes as soon as they happen through software technology. This is done to provide a clear picture of what’s going on with the inventory to all the stakeholders. Real-time inventory eliminates the need to update inventory at fixed intervals with the help of inventory counts. Live inventory system records all the inflows of new stock and the outflow of goods along with the side costs in real-time. Inventory management allows you to have transparent visibility of your stock and where it is in the buying journey. The information that real-time inventory helps you to keep up with is- sales, the quantity of available stock, the quantity of stock ordered but not yet shipped, the cost price of the stock, listed price of goods, the time that the stock takes to sell, returns, discounts, etc.

What are the benefits of tracking live inventory?

. Here are a few benefits that your company will get with a real-time inventory management system-

Saves time - Saves time for the organization as physical counting of inventory is not needed when a real-time inventory management system has been properly integrated into the company’s workings.
Supply chain Management- Inventory is an important element of the supply chain. Live tracking of inventory helps businesses keep a smooth pace throughout the supply chain. Companies can avoid Stock-out situations using real time inventory updates.
Improved customer experience- Real-time inventory helps the company to provide a better customer experience. Following the previous point, an optimal level of inventory can always be maintained. This avoids the situation of not having sufficient goods after order placement by the customer followed by delay in delivery.
Organized warehouse- Your warehouse will automatically become more organized when you implement a real-time inventory system as all goods will be tracked properly.
Better Analysis- You can always have data ready at hand to analyze, check transaction history, keep up with expenses and plan the future of your inventory strategically. Managers can thus manage and plan the Inventory better.

The bottom line…

Having a real-time inventory system can help your organization ace the inventory game by always being up-to-date with the inventory changes. It makes the process of making your customers happy with always having available goods and being on-time with delivery. Live inventory drastically reduces the manual errors and time consumption that can happen if you decide to opt for physical counting of inventory. Keeping real-time data helps you to take strategic decisions for the betterment of your company.

Get started today!

Want to get started with a live inventory system for your business? Worry not. We got your back. We at Radius360x provide personalized real-time inventory management software to solve all your inventory tracking problems and streamline your inventory management process. Book a demo and get started with us today!

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Need for an Order booking tool for your business

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x

What is an order booking tool?

Order booking tool is an application that allows your customers to place orders to you through your sales rep. This can automate and streamline the order booking process. This tool is a shift from a traditional order-taking process to a smart technology-powered automated order booking system.

Selling goods/services is the core survival activity of any business. Processing the orders should go as smoothly as possible to keep the business moving in the right direction. Order Booking tools help you fasten the process to match the pace of your ever-growing workflow with your orders.

Benefits of an order booking tool

The traditional order booking process has a lot of disadvantages such as- manual errors while taking orders, communication gaps between the employees in the order processing chain, issues with inventory visibility, not being operational 24/7, etc., and these disadvantages can seriously harm your reputation in front of your customers eventually harming your revenue.

To overcome these obstacles, technology was incorporated in the order booking process to make automated order booking tools that help streamline the process, giving a satisfactional customer experience.

Below listed are some benefits of order booking tools:

Saves valuable time: Time is the most crucial when it comes to running a business and order booking tools save a lot of time so that your employees can focus on important tasks. It will automate your order booking process from taking the order to billing and invoicing. This gives your sales reps more time to focus on making sales.
Customized product catalogs: An order booking tool helps the sales rep produce a customized product catalog for each customer. They won’t have to carry or courier a traditional product catalog every time a customer asks for information. With the order booking system, digital and personalized catalogs can be created for your customers.
Reduces operational cost and manual errors: An order booking tool saves you labor costs. It also reduces the risks of errors that may occur while taking orders manually. Order booking tools make your ordering and selling process paperless, saving you from the hassle of physical documentation and costs on paper.
Centralized data storage: All the data is stored in one centralized repository and can be accessed whenever needed. All the relevant customer and sales information stored together makes the access and analysis easier for the sales reps. This also helps in making data-driven decisions that can benefit your business.
Always informed with real-time updates: Businesses can get meaningful insights on their current state with the real-time payment and product updates feature of Order booking tools. This also helps the decision-makers and problem solvers to react quickly to any problem that may arise while processing orders.
Ease for Sales Reps: With all other sales functions automated, sales reps can make sales and increase conversions. They can spend their time researching prospects with the Order taking tool handling the sales procedure’s time-consuming tasks like Order history, Order guides, Call scheduling, etc.

Switching from traditional order booking to a technology-based order booking tool can help you get an edge over your competitors and leverage technology for increasing your sales. Help your sales team deliver better results for your company by investing in an order booking tool.

Get a demo with us today!

Our software- Radius360x is a sales automation and order booking tool which will benefit your business by saving time and costs, improving efficiency, and providing better customer service. Get a demo with us today to learn more about how we can help you.

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B2B Marketing strategies that you don't want to ignore

By Nivedita Verma for Radius360x What is B2B Marketing? B2B marketing refers to all the marketing strategies, tactics, and approaches that the companies implement to sell their products in the market to other companies. This kind of marketing is straightforward and information-driven because B2B purchases are made after thorough research. Companies buy a product after considering factors from several departments/ individuals, unlike B2C purchases which have a more emotional purchase behavior. B2B marketing focuses on individuals who make purchases on behalf of or for a company/business. The goal is to be persuasive and engaging enough to make the potential customer respond. The B2B buyer’s journey involves 3 stages: Awareness, Consideration, and decision. In this blog, you’ll find strategies that can help your potential customer move from awareness to consideration quicker. It is also important to understand marketing strategies to keep up with trends, find weak points and stand out amongst the competition. Here are some marketing trends that you don’t want to ignore:

Content Marketing: Just creating content isn’t useful. Intervals of posting, target audience, platforms of posting, type of content, etc. need to be planned effectively for better results. A B2B company should build a proper content marketing strategy that suits them and their customers. Measuring the results of your B2B content marketing strategy in metrics and data is also important. For example, ‘top 10 posts with highest reads’, this way you can create more of what works the best.
SEO: Digital marketing has picked up pace in the past few years. Optimizing your content, website, and social media platforms with keywords helps the users discover your company more easily. A Content marketing strategy implemented with an SEO plan is what would enhance your online presence and make you more discoverable. 45% of large companies invest more than $20,000 per month on SEO to make their business easily reach their target audience.
High-performance website: Invest in building a proper B2B website that is user-friendly, visually appealing, and all-device compatible. Most business owners neglect this factor but it is equally important as any other marketing strategy. Your company’s website plays a big role in defining your online presence. It also increases the chances of prospect conversion. Up to 83% of potential customers look for websites to get more information about service providers. Robust informative content, powerful CTAs, and targeted offers can drive more leads.
Email-marketing campaigns: Boring content-heavy emails that are not personalized according to the reader don't work in today’s age. Build an effective email marketing campaign that nurtures all the stages of your sales funnel. Create emails that give personal recommendations to your customers and prospects. Personalization matters a lot when it comes to nurturing your leads through emails. Email marketing statistics say that 80% of business professionals think email marketing gives a boost in customer retention rates.
Use LinkedIn to drive traffic and increase your online presence: LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B businesses to connect with professionals. This platform requires time and devotion but once leveraged properly, it can yield great results for your B2B business. LinkedIn generates 7X more leads than any other platform and 91% of marketing professionals prefer to use LinkedIn to advertise professional content. LinkedIn can help you post content, engage with your audience more and drive traffic to your website and profile.
Referral marketing: Encouraging promoters or past customers to refer a brand, service, or product is known as referral marketing. Referral marketing can be done via word of mouth, influencer marketing, or other referral marketing program. Referral marketing is a great way to generate leads as 84% of B2B sales initiate with a referral. Also, people are 4X more likely to buy a product that is referred to them by a trusted source.

To work out what best works for your business, test various combinations of the different strategies mentioned above. The key point to keep in mind is to keep it original, valuable, interactive, and optimized according to the platforms you are using. Keep a keen eye to always find ways that make your marketing campaigns unique and different from others. One important thing to keep in mind is to have a plan. Giving serious thought to marketing planning and investing in a good marketing plan is the best thing you can do for your business. You must have a plan for the long run because success in B2B marketing doesn't happen by luck. Have a plan that connects your audience with your purpose and builds a meaningful relationship. Lastly, remember to deliver what you promised to your customers because just a good marketing plan won’t work if you don’t deliver value in your goods/services.

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6 Reasons why you need a Sales and Delivery Automation software

By Anushka Menghwani for Indigo Olive

Businesses that rely on traditional approaches to sales order procedures notice a loss in productivity and the customer return rate they had hoped for. Success for any distributor or manufacturer hinges on becoming incredibly efficient and enhancing customer service. It is essential to make sure order cycles get progressively shorter while keeping total accuracy. Continuing to invest time, energy, and payroll in inefficient manual operations is an expensive mistake, given that corporations in the United States spend about $600 billion on inefficiencies each year. To curb these costs, the aim is to automate as many manual procedures as possible as demand for firms to do complicated, labor-intensive tasks grows. Order and sales processing automation software are designed to save time, increase profitability, and improve customer experience for businesses. With the right online sales order software, your company can reap the benefits listed below and use them to enhance profitability and provide customer service. Sales automation is a strong tool for increasing productivity, increasing sales, and increasing revenue by automating repetitive and time-consuming operations and saving thousands of hours of work. Following are the reasons why you need automated sales and delivery software so your sales force can then concentrate on what they do best: generating leads and closing deals. 1. Effective Delivery Using an automated sales and delivery software helps you keep track of the goods being delivered. There are often communication delays between the driver delivering goods and the seller. To avoid any hindrances arising from this gap, the system provides an inbuilt map which tracks the driver and the goods being delivered. A robust delivery routing tool guarantees that your delivery vehicle is functioning at optimal performance and that no resources are being wasted by being able to monitor them at all times. For faster delivery, it is important that the shortest and fastest route is taken to avoid traffic which significantly in the long term decreases the fuel expenses in turn reducing overall business expenses as well. Radius360x Route Manager helps drivers plan their route for their stops. Our mobile app helps your delivery vehicle reach the destination using the fastest route, in minimum time ensuring timely delivery and satisfied customers. This in turn also reduces delivery time. 2. Easy track of Inventory and Decrease in shortage of goods It is important for businesses to keep an active track of their Inventory. Using automated software helps in maintaining required inventory levels so that the whole distribution process operates smoothly and speedily. It assists in obtaining precise details regarding the products that are available, in demand, and those that are not. This results in a decrease in shortage of goods with better inventory management. Radius360x’s Inventory feature gives live inventory updates which allows the sales representative to take orders for the items based on the actual inventory in stock. Customer expectations are better achieved and in a timely manner. Sales representatives also have access to the availability and quantity of order placed at 3. Operational Efficiency, Increased Productivity and Time Saving Cost efficiency, along with time savings, was one of the top three predicted benefits of sales order process automation, according to a poll conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Center. When respondents used automated solutions for their sales order procedures, they witnessed a 67 percent cost reduction. Automation not only guarantees that processes function efficiently and reliably, but it also ensures that inefficiencies are minimized and that your standard procedures are consistently implemented. While all the functions revolving around a sale are automated, sales representatives and the rest of the team can focus on their more operational tasks which increases efficiency and saves time in order fulfillment. The approach with which your company handles consumer orders has a direct impact on the order-to-payment process. When talking about real figures, order cycle durations from when an order is received and when the warehouse is alerted are on average 8.6 hours without automation, but just 4.6 hours with automated procedures. By using Radius360x order taking process becomes easier as sales representatives have all information about inventory, prices, etc available to them while taking an order. Radius360x has features like Order guides, which are templates of items that particular customers have brought frequently which come very handy to the sales representative. 4. Improved Customer Service Your sales representatives have fast access to all key client account information since your order processing software interfaces with your production-related system. With all account information at their fingertips, your sales force can focus on providing quality service to your clients. By using Radius 360x you and your customers will benefit from the advantages of speed and accuracy, and they will have a better user experience without the annoying delays and undesired mistakes. This will help you provide the most efficient experience to your customers as well by cutting your inefficiencies in the whole process. 5. Improved scheduling and faster order fulfillment. Sales automation software can also help with scheduling appointments, demos and calls. Your orders can be processed in a significantly shorter timescale thanks to the reduced order input wait time and quicker system processing. It also means that invoices could be generated faster, and the time between ordering and receiving payment is shortened, allowing you to keep a positive cash flow. Radius360x helps you to schedule customer visits weekly or monthly, never miss a visit. The app helps the sales representatives manage all processes in one place. They have easy access to all required information, invoices, items, prices, inventory, catalog etc. 6. Better Sales forecasts and Projections Customer behavior and their orders can be stored and accessed in one centralized repository, which helps to track and analyze customer and order information faster and more efficiently. This then in turn helps in making better decisions and sales projections as well as forecasts. Radius360x helps you track all this information and access it quickly to study order patterns of customers and make better decisions regarding your inventory and sales projections. Implementing steps to improve sales order procedures , delivery updates and data collection may help executives in any company avoid typical mistakes, which could save money while also making consumers pleased with the service they receive. Radius360x serves as the complete solution for all your sales and delivery automation needs to increase efficiency in these functions as well as improve sales and customer experiences.

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4 Advantages of optimizing your delivery routes

By Anushka Menghwani for Indigo Olive

Businesses that need to make multiple deliveries daily often face issues like traffic jams, delays in deliveries, roadblocks, etc. Poor planning of routes may lead to drivers taking longer to reach their destination and increasing costs for the business.

More so, driver salary and fuel expenses account for 59.8% of total expenses per mile. Fleet managers need to consider various factors like traffic, roadblocks, etc. while deciding the delivery routes.

Delivery route optimization is concerned with decreasing driving time. Many firms are unaware of its advantages. Below are 4 advantages of using Radius360x Delivery route planner.

1. Decreased time spent on planning routes and better warehouse management

You can improve the performance of your business by reducing the time spent in planning delivery routes. Doing this manually results in a lot of time consumption.

Our application optimizes your delivery routes so your team can focus on other key areas of the business. The application also gives you real-time updates of your package in the warehouse.

2. More deliveries and collections per vehicle

Reduced delivery time will result in a higher number of per-day deliveries. Effective route planning helps avoid multiple vehicles using extra resources. Using our software can increase your productivity. Our tools help you select the best delivery route for your daily distribution. More deliveries mean more business.

3. Increased on-time arrival rate

By using a tool for optimizing your delivery route, you can save up to 35%-40% time in delivering your goods. This will give you much happier customers and increased customer satisfaction.

With our delivery route application that integrates Google Maps, the best routes can be created quickly. Arrival time can be shortened to maximum efficiency. The feature creates the shortest, most optimized route for your deliveries. Thus, they can be completed in time.

4. Lowered fuel costs.

Less road time means less fuel. By spending less time driving, high savings in fuel consumption can be achieved. Our software, by giving the best multi-stop route options with minimal traffic and road time, helps you reduce your fuel expenses.

If you decide to just skip the whole process and begin deliveries without proper planning, a lot of vehicles might end up in the same neighborhood. This would be poor decision-making because it increases your costs. Additionally, it decreases your efficiency and reduces your profit. That is why several firms are using automated delivery software nowadays. It helps them achieve greater productivity and improve customer satisfaction.

For more information on the features of the Radius360x Delivery Route application, click here.

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3 benefits of business intelligence tools for businesses

By Anushka Menghwani for Indigo Olive

Business intelligence tools give businesses an advantage of analysing trends and strategizing better over their competitors. According to MicroStrategy 2020, 64% of users reported that BI data and analytics helped improve their efficiency and productivity. Business Intelligence tools formulate and provide you with insights from the data in the systems and assist in decision making.

Through BI Tools, businesses can make reliable decisions backed by data. Such tools can help enterprises meet challenges like global competition, narrowing margins, etc. Businesses can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by reducing the manual labour spent on collecting and reporting information.

Companies of all sizes need BI Tools in today’s age to keep up with the current trends, help in enhanced strategizing and compete effectively. Data analytics makes decision-making 5x faster for businesses according to Better Buys.

Here are 3 ways in which Radius360x’s Business Intelligence tool can benefit you:-

1. Improved sales forecasts & projections

BI tools help you make data driven decisions which are precise and accurate. Radius360x assists you in formulating highly effective strategies based on data analysis. Sales representatives and managers have access to valuable business insights that can be studied through the data presented by our BI Tool.

Improved sales forecasts can be made regarding the products being bought most by customers, their patterns, quantities of the products available, sales trends, etc. It also helps enhance deals and negotiations and monitor the sales activities according to data analysis.

2. Quality and accurate data

Business Intelligence tools provide quality and accurate data, which manual reporting doesn’t. Manual reporting leaves room for errors and mistakes, which is highly unlikely in case of BI tools. Quality of data is the most important factor when making decisions regarding the enterprise’s functioning.

The Radius360x BI Tool also helps in visualizing important information in the form of graphs and tables for quicker analysis by a glance. Data driven decisions can be relied on for key decisions regarding the enterprise.

3. Identifying Opportunities

Customer behavior and their orders can be stored and accessed in one centralized repository, which helps to track and analyze customer and order information faster and more efficiently.

Radius360x gives you an edge over your competitors by providing ease in data presentation and analysis. Through reporting of functions like customer behavior and patterns, sales representatives and managers can identify new opportunities. They can generate leads by studying consumer data available and create new opportunities.

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Blogs

Improve customer loyalty with sales & delivery applications

Personalizing the Delivery Experience: How Sales and Delivery Applications Can Improve Customer Loyalty

Conclusion

Data driven decisions: Why and How?

Make smart moves with data driven decisions

Why is it important to make data driven decisions?

But how?

Cloud-based platform for distribution business

Importance of Cloud-based platform

Cloud-based platform to overcome challenges in business

Integrating Order Processing Software with your 3PL

6 perks of Integrating with your 3PL

What is meant by integrating with your 3PL (Third-party logistics)?

Here are 6 reasons why you must integrate with your 3PL partner:

Conclusion

Ecommerce for wholesalers & manufacturers

Better customer experience with ecommerce

Your customers want a better ordering system

Integrate QuickBooks with your ecommerce system

Steps to improve the life of your drivers

Steps to make your drivers’ job easy

Below listed are some ways in which you can help your drivers to do a better job:

How to build a Market Penetration strategy?

Market Penetration: What, why and how?

Meaning of market penetration

Calculation of penetration rate

Importance of market penetration for field service businesses

How to build a market penetration strategy?

Improve your field service operations

5 ways to improve your field service operations

Read below about the 5 ways to improve your field service operations:

Map the most efficient route

Equip field sales rep with offline application

Automize field service tasks

Connect your team on a single application

Allow field sales reps to operate through mobile

Technology creates a win-win for distributors, retailers, and customers

Technology is beneficial to retailers, distributors, and consumers alike

Let’s see how technology help distributors, retailers, and customers:

Conclusion

Importance of competitive market research

Why competitive market research is important

Conclusion

Sales reps of the future

The distributor sales reps of the future are here

Technologies that are a boon to the sales reps are:

Conclusion

Scale your Distribution Business

5 ways to scale your distribution business

Here are 5 effective ways to scale your distribution business:

Cyber security tips for the F&B industry

Cyber Security Tips For Food And Beverage industry

ERP: it’s Affordability & Benefits

How affordability and ERP can go hand in hand for SMEs

What is an ERP?

Is an ERP too expensive for you?

Here are some benefits of using an ERP system for small and medium businesses:

Conclusion

Supporting applications to enhance your order booking process

Tools to enhance your order booking process

Here are some supporting applications that field sales reps can utilize alongside an order booking tool:

Switch from paper to online order taking

5 benefits of online order taking process

Here are 5 benefits of switching from paper to online order taking:

Radius360x Mobile Application

Radius360x Comes To Your Pocket With An All-New Mobile App

Greater Productivity With The Mobile App

Radius360x Product Solutions

1. Streamline Your Sales Process With Our Sales Rep Application

2. Manage Your Fleet On Ground With Our Route Planner App

3. Make Better Decisions With Our Insight Analysis Dashboard: BI Reporting Tool

4. Sample Management

Schedule A Demo

SaaS Integration: Approaches, Comparison, & it's Challenges

What is SaaS integration?

Critical approaches in SaaS integration

Difference between SaaS integration, App integration, and API integration

SaaS integration challenges

Beverage Distribution Industry Trends In 2022